
Class X/ ^ n ^ 
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CflEHRIGllT DEPOSIT. 



THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 



The 
Tragedy of Armenia 

A Brief Study and Interpretation 



BY 

BERTHA S. PAPAZIAN 



With an Introduction by Secretary James L. Barton, D.D., 
of the American Board 




THE PILGRIM PRESS 
BOSTON CHICAGO 






75- 



COPTHIGHT 1918 

Bt bertha S. PAPAZIAN 



THE PILGRIM PBESS 
BOSTON 



DcC -6 1918 



©CLA506818 



TO THOSE 

WHO COUNTED HONOR ABOVE LIFE 

THE ARMENIAN DEAD 



FOREWORD 

This little book springs from my desire to 
bring to the attention of my fellow Americans 
the claims upon our sympathy and support of 
a great little nation, which, at this critical 
moment of world history, is making a supreme 
effort for long-denied liberation. Armenia is 
known to us chiefly through her sufferings. 
With the other phases of her story we are 
largely unacquainted. To appreciate fully 
the justice of her appeal for complete emanci- 
pation, we should know more of her character 
and of the part she has played in the past, and 
in the present war. I shall be happy if this 
little book, in any degree, serves this end. 
Bertha S. Papazian. 

Cambridge, Mass- 
October, 1918. 



INTRODUCTION 

Armenian crucifixion at the hand of the 
Turkish Government and with the approval 
if not direct co-operation of Germany, has 
touched the heart of humanity. The world 
has witnessed one of the most ancient and 
notable of all the races of history subject to 
protracted attacks, atrocious beyond the power 
of words to describe, with no conceivable 
reason except to exterminate an entire people 
whose chief offence was industry and whose 
unforgivable crime the profession and prac- 
tice of Christianity. 

This story is the Armenian side of one of 
the tragedies of ancient and modern history, 
told simply, without passion and harrowing 
details, and yet with directness and pathos 
commanding our profoundest admiration. 

It is one of the marvels of history that the 
Armenian nation, swept with almost perpetual 
war, persecution and massacre for many long 
dark centuries, has retained its beautiful lan- 
guage, its religion and its national soul, and 



X INTRODUCTION 

now in these days of race redemption is ready 
to come into its own as a people worthy and 
capable of self-determination. 

The Armenians, by their loyalty and devo- 
tion to the cause of the Allies in Russia, 
Turkey, Persia and Palestine, as well as in the 
armies of England, France and the United 
States, cannot, without most flagrant display 
of ingratitude, be ignored when the status of 
the lesser nations is decided. 

Belgium, by her heroic resistance to the 
atrocious demands of Germany, saved Paris 
and made the world her debtor; so Armenia, 
refusing to cast in her lot with the Central 
Powers in partnership with Islam, stood loyal 
to the Allies and made it impossible for 
Germany to consummate her designs in the 
Caucasus and Eastern Turkey. 

Serbia and Belgium have been martyr 
nations for four years, Poland and Bohemia 
for from one to three centuries; but Armenia 
has been in virtual bondage for a thousand 
years, during which period she has kept her 
home fires burning, her hopes undimmed and 
her soul unintimidated. Armenia lives today, 
although bleeding and stricken, because she 



INTRODUCTION XI 

was worthy. If this war ends and the final 
peace treaties are written and the Peace 
Congress dissolves without Armenia's obtain- 
ing her independence from Moslem rule with 
every opportunity for self-direction and self- 
expression in quietness and safety, then this 
war will in so far have been fought in vain. 

We ask for the emancipation of Armenia 
from the rule of the Turk and the Russian, 
not because she has been for centuries en- 
slaved, not because she has been afflicted as 
few other nations have suffered, and yet has 
persevered; not for pity or for sympathy's 
sake, but in the name of justice and inherent 
right to live as a free people. Tested in the 
furnace of the centuries of affliction, and 
weighed in the balance of national endow- 
ments, Armenians have demonstrated their 
inherent worth. From every point of view 
and measured by every standard of national 
capacity, they have a right to demand and 
expect the support of the Allies in their claims 
for national recognition. 

This little book reveals the spirit and soul 
of Armenia, the depths of the longing of that 
ancient yet present living people, the height 



XU INTRODUCTION 

of their hopes and the earnestness of their 
purpose. We have been accustomed to think 
of the Armenians as a bleeding, stricken 
nation, and to them our sympathies have 
flowed in substantial expression. Let us now 
think of them as rising from the ashes of 
their persecution into a newness of life, and 
with their loyalty to the eternal principles of 
democracy, justice, righteousness and brother- 
hood established, let us heartily welcome them 
into the sisterhood of nations. America, 
which for nearly a century has labored for 
and suffered with them more than any other 
western nation, should be the first to champion 
their cause and pledge them its imchanging 
allegiance and support. 

James L. Barton. 



CONTENTS 

PAOB 

Foreword vii 

Introduction ix 

I Pagan Days 1 

II From the Conversion to the Cru- 
sades 18 

III Under Turkish Domination and the 

Spiritual Renaissance 41 

IV The Rise and Influence of the Near 

Eastern Question 58 

V After the Massacres 81 

VI In the World War 100 

VII In the World Court 128 

Notes 149 

Bibliography 159 



THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 



Lift up thy head, weep not! Holy is grief, 
And great and wholesome. Earth naught nobler 
knows 

Than is the victim hrave beneath his cross. 
'Tis in the shadow that the dawn-light grows. 

The black destroyers, the red torturers 
Shall vanish — they like smoke shall disappear, 

And from thine ashes thou shall rise again, 

Made young by suffering, radiant, bright and clear. 



Thou shalt come forth triumphant from these shades; 

Stars shall thine eyes become, and sparkle bright; 
Thy wounds to radiant roses shall be changed. 

And from thy whitened hair shall spring forth light. 

Thou at the opening of the ways shall stand. 
And break the bonds that held thee down in gloom. 

Mother, rise! thy pains were childbirth pangs; 
It is a world that stirs within thy womb! 

— From the " Lullaby for Mother Armenia " 
By Archag Tchobanian. 

(Translated into English by Alice Stone Blackwell) 



The Tragedy of Armenia 



Chaptee I 
PAGAN DAYS 

ALTHOUGH these are the days of action 
rather than of reflection; although the 
hurried massing of miUions of men and 
of billions of dollars, the building of immense 
docks and factories and railroads and hospitals 
and camps, of fleet upon fleet for sea and sky, 
the marshaling of labor, the organizing of huge 
civilian populations, the endless minutige of 
war, are taxing all the energies of mankind 
to the uttermost, there is, at the same time, 
an intensified thinking going on, often sub- 
conscious, but more incisive and compelling 
than any we have experienced in many a long 
year. The ethical and intellectual laws about 
which we had been feebly and abstractedly 
debating have suddenly become as imperiously 
real, as tangibly evident, as any demonstra- 
tion in mathematics or physics. We know 
that the war we are witnessing, in spite of 



2 THE TEAGEDY OFJaRMENIA 

its overwhelming material manifestations, is 
nothing other than an immense moral up- 
heaval; that it is the innermost become outer- 
most; the word made flesh. And we are 
forced to recognize the irresistible power of 
Spiritual Law. 

It is less difficult now than formerly to 
present the claims of far-away Armenia. As 
sharers in the same peril we are more ready 
to listen and consider. We dare not, as be- 
fore, flee with the cry upon our lips, "This is 
too sad to talk about." We are eager to hear 
all. "The greatest tragedy in all human 
history" draws more and more near to us. 
Especially when we realize, as more and more 
we are coming to do, that this age-long 
agony, from even the contemplation of which 
the selfish world has shrunk, typifies in little 
the present tremendous conflict between 
Darkness and Light, and that it is the sub- 
stratum and occasion, in a very real though 
indirect and negative way, of the world 
conflict. 

To the tragedy of tragedies, only the Master 
Craftsman could have designed such a climax 
as this. A small and distant people, pitifully 



PAGAN DAYS 



praying in the name of Liberty and Chris- 
tianity for redemption from the foe of both, 
appealing in the midst of massacre and devas- 
tation to its treaty rights — what diplomat 
would believe that the neglect to heed could 
entail such stupendous consequences? What 
sovereign could foresee that as a result of mere 
callous disregard of moral and treaty obliga- 
tions, a new sanction would be given to inter- 
national treachery, a new impetus to the 
claims of tyranny; that the Kaiser would 
seize the opportunity to make common cause 
with the Sultan; that bargains would be 
struck to neutralize the peril of international 
interference, railroad concessions balancing 
against murdered human beings, and banking 
concessions against outraged womanhood, 
pillage, and arson; that pan-Islamic, pan- 
Turanian schemes would emerge into pros- 
pect, flattered by the encouragement of a 
European government which was in time to 
reject all Christian and democratic philosophy 
and to unite its creed of ruthlessness and brute 
force to that of the Turk, the ancient arch- 
enemy of all that we hold dear? 

But the record is before us, and it is only 



4 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

in the light of the world conflagration that 
we can learn its full import. All poetic 
justice seems blind when compared with the 
judgment which this light reveals. One reads 
in profound sorrow mingled with admiration 
for the heroic victims of this international 
bad faith, of these unscrupulous imperial 
designs, and with shame and reprobation in 
differing degree for the other protagonists. 
And, as the climax approaches, and stern 
retributive Justice enters and the fateful 
lightnings of her terrible swift sword enflame 
the whole world, even then the soul can but 
approve the awful sentence and exclaim: 
"Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming 
of the Lord!" 

One despairs of being able to summon the 
idea in all the force of its beauty and terror. 
One longs for images but none come except 
those, complex and majestic, which are created 
only through long contemplation of this mag- 
nificent and dolorous history. One is the more 
embarrassed in the task because, since those 
dread years of '95, '96, and '09, when hundreds 
of thousands of defenceless Armenian men, 
women, and children were slaughtered in 



PAGAN DAYS 6 

cold blood and with complete impunity by 
the Turkish overlords, while responsible 
Europe looked passively on, and even humane 
but un-committed America seemed unable to 
interfere, the world has accepted Armenia as 
a static symbol of suffering. It has seen in 
her merely a figui'e with hands outstretched 
in useless supplication, and, except for the 
coin which it has given her for bread, it has 
passed on without other thought or reaction. 

To envisage the tragedy as involving in its 
course the flow of the blood of all nations is, 
therefore, not only to give it its true political 
and moral bearing, but to reveal something 
of its own inherent Titanic grandeur. When 
the Editor of The World's Work, prefacing 
Ambassador Morgenthau's series of articles 
on "Two Years of War in Turkey," says: 
"Americans who wish to know why their sons 
are being transformed into soldiers can look 
to this narrative of events in the minaretted 
city on the Bosphorus," he indicates the power 
and sweep of the forces that have been there 
at work. With "Berlin to Bagdad" in mind 
as the slogan of the projected pan-Germania, 
the failure of the Powers to fulfill their treaty 



6 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

obligations to Armenia in the years '95 and 
'96, when the call most emphatically came 
for the decent solution of the Near Eastern 
question, becomes clearly an evasion of duty 
the most fate-laden in all history. And the 
aspirations and unaided struggles of Armenia 
assume, accordingly, a majesty and a signifi- 
cance absolutely unsurpassed. 

But, unfortunately, both for us of America, 
and for the West in general, as well as for 
the Armenians themselves, the spiritual 
glories of this great national drama have been 
all but hidden from foreigners, except for the 
few, who, either because of direct contact 
with this people or some other incentive, 
have been led especially to that rich field of 
research which has to do with their extraor- 
dinary history. For in modern universal his- 
tory they do not appear, their political identity 
having become lost in that of their ulti- 
mate conqueror. And as the Turk himself, 
until about the middle of the last century, 
was virtually ostracized from European civil- 
ization, the Armenians passed into an oblivion 
only the more complete. When, therefore, 
toward the end of the nineteenth c«itury, 



PAGAN DAYS 



they appeared before the world as the victims 
of cruelties and injustices indescribable and 
unredressed, it is not to be wondered at, 
perhaps, that their name should come to be 
regarded chiefly as one of most shocking hope- 
lessness and dread. 

But this indicated a generally thoughtless 
habit of mind. A prolonged national ordeal 
implies a great national soul, and ought in 
itself to have suggested the splendidly heroic 
calibre of the people and of their antecedent 
history. Not only as the victims of colossal 
wrongs, but as a force singularly noble and 
dynamic ought we to know this race, — 
one of the most ancient — which today in spite 
of oppression and persecutions that would 
either have tamed or annihilated one of less 
resolute fibre, is still, wherever possible, lavish- 
ing its remaining strength on behalf of an 
emancipated world! 

We cannot find in history a parallel to this 
story. We turn to art for terms of comparison 
and find none except in the tragic Greek 
concept of Prometheus chained to the rocks 
and torn by vultures for having brought light 
to the world. Even the artistic imagination 



8 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

has never compassed so extended a panorama 
of undying aspiration and obstinate disaster. 
How inadequate is "Polyeuete," Comeille's 
suggestive embodiment of the purely religious 
side of the struggle ! And yet it is to literary 
tragedy — ^to that of classic Greece — that the 
mind must hark back if it would find any- 
where, though on an immeasurably slighter 
scale, a story told with an equally perfect 
symmetry, an equal concentration of interest, 
a terror and pity equally progressive. 

For dramatic time, the tragedy is set amid 
the rolling centuries. For place, we have a 
stage unsurpassed in its grandeur and historic 
association. And for chief protagonists, an 
Aryan^ people, independent, inquiring and 
original of spirit, adventurous, practical and 
liberty-loving, whom fate leads beyond the 
frontiers of Europe and their brothers in 
blood to where the mighty headland of Asia 
is washed by the Black and Caspian seas. 

Over twenty-five hundred years ago the 
actors entered the stage, little dreaming that 
they were treading soil destined to become 
"the most coveted highway of the world." 



PAGAN DAYS 



Before them as they marched eastward from 
Thrace, Thessaly, Phrygia, stood the great 
pinnacle of Ararat, yet to become a "memo- 
rial shaft" to millions of their martyred 
descendants. Snow-capped, towering seven- 
teen thousand feet into the sky, it stood 
companioned by its sister peaks. In the 
general region were other mountains, among 
them the snow-crowned Varag. Encircled by 
some of these, upon the shoulders of the 
tableland, was the intensely blue salt lake of 
Van; and breaking from the mountain and 
hillsides were beautiful fountains and streams, 
and great rivers, two of which, the Tigris 
(ancient Hiddekel) and the Euphrates, Jew- 
ish history tells us, bordered the Garden of 
Eden. 

But the legend of Adam and Eve, and of 
the Creator who walked in the Garden; the 
ark of ISToah upon the peak of Ararat; the 
sojourn of Noah and his companions for 
some time upon the crest of Subhan Dagh — 
a strictly Armenian legend — these were to play 
their part in kindling patriotic imagination 
only at a later day. The first step was to 
maintain tribal integrity against the encroach- 



10 THE TRAGEDY OP ARMENIA 

merits of surrounding despots. And, charac- 
teristically, the first episode in the national 
drama — it comes to us in a burst of idealized 
patriotic glory — is the victory of the freedom- 
loving Haig, the founder of the first Armenian 
dynasty, over the Assyrian tyrant, Bel. 

A succession of many centuries followed, 
marked by the vicissitudes which are the 
usual lot of a border state, and during which 
indigenous tribes evidently became fused with 
the race of Haig, their great Aryan conqueror 
and chief. More and more extended grew the 
kingdom under a long line of kings of this 
Haikean dynasty until toward the beginning 
of the second dynasty, the Arshagoonian, 
under Tigranes the Great, it included Media, 
Assyria, Cilicia, and Phoenicia. To conflicts 
with Assyria, Babylonia, Media, Parthia, 
and Persia had been added conflicts with 
Macedonia and Rome. Again and again we 
see these mighty forces victorious, but only 
partially so. For the Armenians, though 
frequently overpowered, were never overcome. 
By statecraft, and by their remarkable power 
of assimilating their enemies no less than by 
force of arms, they continued to maintain 



PAGAN DAYS 11 

their race and its traditions against all odds. 
Some innate and irresistible moral stamina 
enabled them to draw to their cause even the 
Persian satraps, Parthian princes, and Roman 
and Seleucian governors who at times ruled 
over them. Under such suzerainty, they 
often gathered strength to rise against the 
old or against some new oppressor, who, bent 
upon the conquest of Europe or of Asia, 
swept the country from east to west, or from 
west to east. 

But war with Rome, instigated, during a 
period of unprecedented strength and glory, 
by the Parthian king, Mithridates, the 
father-in-law of Tigranes; wars between 
Parthia and Rome and between Rome and 
Persia were to reduce still further the 
Armenian dominion to the intolerable posi- 
tion of a strictly buffer state. It became a 
perpetual battle ground, now tributary to 
Rome, now to Parthia; but even when thus 
tributary, Armenian leaders of royal and 
ancient clans or houses, the Ardzrounians, 
the Pagratians, the Seunians and others, 
struggling independently both against their 
would-be masters and against outlying states. 



12 THE TBAGEDY OF AEMENIA 

succeeded not only in maintaining the stand- 
ard of Armenian independence, but even in 
establishing new principalities. And as the 
political power waned, the national character 
became more and more clearly defined and the 
longing for a truly national life more intense. 

In the kaleidoscopic pageant of these 
turbulent centuries, the stage is peopled with 
mighty historic figures. Confronting Haig, 
Aram, Ardashes, Ara, Tigranes and the 
other Armenian kings, are Bel, Tiglath- 
Pileser, Sardanapalus, Semiramis, Cyrus, 
Darius, Alexander the Great, Mithridates, 
Sulla, Crassus, Pompey, Mark Antony. 
Abroad, we see the Armenian king and his 
followers at the siege of Troy, on the side 
of Priam, or at Nineveh, at its fall; or, in 
less fortunate days, against a background of 
torches and garlands, we see him kneeling — 
a vassal king — ^to receive the crown from Nero 
in the area before the palace at Rome; or we 
see him captive, fettered with golden chains, 
a token of his own triumph which Mark 
Antony sent to Cleopatra. 

In the politico-social life of this extended 



PAGAN DAYS 13 

period, we catch glimpses of other dramatic 
figm-es: as prisoner of war, "a noble Hebrew 
prince, Shempad by name" who affiliated him- 
self with his conquerors, and became the 
foimder of one of the royal households; 
the sons of Sennacherib who, after having 
assassinated their imperial father, "escaped 
into the land of Armenia," were received by 
the court and married Armenian princesses; 
and Hannibal, who fleeing from the vengeance 
of Rome, took refuge first with Antiochus of 
Seleucia, and then with Ardashes of Armenia 
for whom he drew the plan of the city of 
Ardashat. 

Fortified castles of oriental splendor, cita- 
dels, towered walls, laden caravans and river 
argosies, market places, caravanseries, temples 
to the gods — to those of Persia and Greece 
and other foreign countries as well as to those 
of Armenia — make up the shifting back- 
ground of the scenes. For both through the 
foreign conquests imposed upon her, and 
through her own conmiercial genius, the 
nation is in contact with and is at school to 
the world. The costumes of the characters 
are vivid; especially do we hear of this 



14 THE THAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

during the reign of Tigranes, when the dress 
of the period is described as "beautiful enough 
to transform even the most ugly." This, of 
course, refers to that of the favored classes, 
who also, men as well as women, wore heavy 
gold chains and necklaces and "rings of gold 
in their ears." The king wears now a wreath 
of pearls, or a crown set with immense rubies, 
placed upon his head by one of his own 
Pagratian nobles, who alone enjoyed this 
privilege; or again the crown and purple of 
Rome as in the days of Antoninus Pius, who 
sent these tokens of royalty to the Armenian 
king by special embassy. Even the pages of 
the royal households wear "rich vestments." 
There is much use of fur. The costumes of 
the military officers and soldiery add to the 
color of the picture. In the days of Herodotus 
"their arms are like those of the Phrygians." 
They wear helmets of laced leather and carry 
spears and shields. Later we see them in iron 
armor, charging magnificently upon the horses 
for which their country was famous, and which 
enabled the Armenian soldiery to become "the 
best cavalry in the world." 

In the temple schools, religious and ritual- 



PAGAN DAYS 15 

istic lore is taught, and on the tablets in the 
temple libraries are the archives of priest and 
king for the enlightenment of patriot and 
scholar. A multitude of cults claim each its 
votaries. As the people come under the sway 
now of Macedonia, now of Rome, now of 
Persia, each tries to impose upon them her 
own particular culture. The reflective and 
cosmopolitan mind of the race is turned upon 
the thought of each, even while the basic 
allegiance to national tradition is being 
fostered popularly by the bards — especially 
those of Coghtn, a locality famous alike for its 
minstrels and its vineyards — who go from 
castle to castle and from festival to festival 
singing the cosmic myth of the old Armenian 
sun-god, Vahakn, or the more human romances 
of love and battle which marked the lives of 
the ancient kings. From the lips of these 
singers the people learn of the frightful 
dragons slain by the early heroes, the dragon 
being their symbol for mighty enemy na- 
tions. They hear, too, of the generous largess 
of their own kings, in the songs which 
recount glowingly that it "rained gold when 
Ardashes became King," and that the "pearls 



Id THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

fell in showers when Queen Satenik became 
a bride." 

Banquets, too, in honor of the gods ; great 
festival days which bring the people to the 
groves of sacred poplars by the leaves of 
which the priests divine; or to the banks of 
the rivers where white horses and cattle are 
offered to the waves; to the fetes champetres 
on Navasard, the New Year, when libations 
are poured to Aramazd; or to the temples 
where flocks of doves are loosed and roses 
strewn in honor of the goddess Anahit, — all 
these festivals and ceremonials serve to unite 
the people, to develop the national conscious- 
ness, to engender what Tchobanian calls "the 
love of the race for itself." 

But the racial soul, though preserved and 
differentiated through centuries of struggle 
and at the icost of immense suffering, is none 
the less, by the first century of our era, 
seemingly in solution. Natural inclination as 
well as force of circumstances are drawing 
the people unconsciously but irresistibly 
toward the culture of the Romans, and of the 
Greeks, their one-time congeners of Thrace 
and Thessaly. But Persia, their formidable 



PAGAN DAYS 17 

eastern neighbor, has also a noble culture and 
an inflexible will to conquer, and it would 
seem unavoidable, and therefore the part of 
wisdom, to yield much to her. 

A higher destiny, however, awaited the 
Armenians. Neither to the Romans nor to 
the Persians were they to surrender their 
spiritual identity. The vision of a new order 
was to take possession of their souls — an 
order differing religiously, socially, and poht- 
ically from any that had preceded it. It was 
a moment fraught with worlds of how much 
significance and peril, when, at the dawn of 
the Christian era, politically in vassalage to 
Pagan powers, the race turned its eyes toward 
Judea. 



Chapter II 

FROM THE CONVERSION TO THE 
CRUSADES 

THE nature and significance of the Chris- 
tian phase of the Armenian struggle is 
mirrored in the gigantic conflict which 
is going on before our eyes today. It is, and 
has been, chiefly, an aspect and a continua- 
tion of the terrific combat which threatened 
to annihilate Europe at the time of the 
Mohammedan invasions. It is the conflict of 
two irreconcilables : the philosophy of Christ 
with its inherent democracy and its progres- 
sive implications, its divine discontent, and 
that of Islam — especially of Turkish Islam — 
with its autocratic and fatalistic leanings. 
And this, of course, is the fundamental issue 
of the present struggle. The fact that Ger- 
man "iron crosses" figure on the side of the 
enemy; the fact that the German deification 
of Force and of the Sword goes by some 
other name in no way alters the identity of 
the issue. Teuton and Turk have united to 



FKOM CONVERSION TO CRUSADES 19 

evoke again the abhorrent vision of world 
conquest in the name of a God of Battles. 
Had the Mohammedans of India, Persia, 
China, Arabia, and Egypt responded to the 
Berlin-Constantinople invitation to rise in 
Holy War against the Christian vs^orld, we 
should now be experiencing the full truth of 
this statement in all its devastating import. 

The Armenian phase of this struggle of 
ethically inspired democracy against theo- 
cratic absolutism covers a period of about 
fifteen hundred years. In the case of indi- 
viduals and communities, it began even earlier 
than that, no doubt in the first century to 
which the Armenians trace the beginnings of 
their martyrology, in the person of the 
Princess Santoukhd. The estabhshment of 
Christianity as a national religion by King 
Tiridates, in the year 301, suggests a long 
antecedent development of the faith among 
the people in general, and the usual price in 
suffering. But this is partly a matter of civil 
history. Exclusively religious wars do not 
appear to have occurred until some time after 
the official conversion, although a conflict of 
this sort is recorded in the year 232, with 



20 THE TEAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

Ardashir of Persia as instigator. And in the 
year 311, because of its religious beliefs, the 
nation had incurred the hostility of Rome to 
such an extent that, according to Eusebius, 
the Emperor Maximianus declared general 
war upon it. This particular disaster was, 
however, averted by the accession of Constan- 
tine to the throne. 

With the bare fact of a Christianity in- 
eradicable from the people, and for which 
they have suffered greatly, we are all more 
or less familiar through the later stories of 
Turkish persecution. But it is a fact which 
has lost rather than gained because of a too 
casual iteration. In centuries dominated by 
commercial considerations — like the beginning 
of the present, and the past — it had no prac- 
tical weight whatever. As an incentive to 
armed intervention on their behalf, we know 
that it utterly failed, Christianity as a rally- 
ing point, or as an inspired conviction and rule 
of life, having everywhere lost its force in the 
West. 

But circumstances have helped to make of 
Armenia the unceasing champion of this 
stupendous cause. Among nations she is the 



FROM CONVERSION TO CRUSADES 21 

mother of Red Cross knights par excellence. 
Persecution has only increased her fidelity 
and her courage and clarified her vision. 
Proximity and subjection to anti- Christian 
rule have enabled her to estimate properly 
the menace of this sovereignty. And even 
as she has struggled against it throughout 
her history, so has she warned Europe of its 
danger and invoked her aid. 

To imderstand her story we must therefore 
re-orient ourselves with regard both to the 
idea "Christianity," and to the idea "tragedy" 
of which Christianity has been in large part 
the occasion. We must cease to see in them 
mere fortuitous circumstance. It was the 
heroic adoption and defence of an exalted life 
principle which has brought the Armenians 
so much suffering. And the consequences are 
not to be regarded as meaningless disaster, 
but as genuine tragedy in the classic sense: 
a doom fashioned for itself, in large measure, 
by high and exceptional character through 
uncompromising devotion to some great end. 

Let us remember, first, that the pioneer 
adoption of Christianity by the Pagan Arme- 



22 THE TRAGEDY OP ARMENIA 

nian state was a consciously creative act, 
and that it required more hardihood, origi- 
nality and hospitality of mind than was 
involved in the adoption of this religion after 
it had received the sanction of Home and 
Byzantium. It was, in fact, a more mo- 
mentous step than that which had led their 
ancestors to leave their European brothers 
and strike out across the highlands of Asia; 
although it signified in the realm of ideas 
something of the same capacity for adventure 
and leadership. And shortly this tendency 
was to receive further illustration along still 
other moral lines. 

It is worthy of note that the Armenian 
church which St. Gregory founded and King 
Tiridates proclaimed some years before the 
proclamation of Constantine, was to remain 
an independent church, in spite of persistent 
overtures from both the Roman and Greek 
churches, and the practical advantages which 
might naturally have accrued from alliance 
with either. Second, that it was to assume 
very early in its history a democratic char- 
acter, the election of the Catholicos and other 
clergy by popular consent being one of its 



FROM CONVERSION TO CRUSADES 23 

outstanding features. And third, that al- 
though originally of an austere primitive 
simplicity, it soon appeared too ritualistic to 
a portion of this spiritually progressive people, 
for as early as the fifth century there appeared 
in Armenia a powerful and much persecuted 
Protestant sect, the Thonrakians, to the in- 
fluence of which as it spread under various 
names through Europe, historians attribute 
the Reformation, and John Fiske, in his 
Beginnings of New England/ the Puritan 
movement which has moulded the character of 
our American institutions. 

Thus we see this politically subject Aryan 
race whose lot was cast beyond the frontiers 
of Europe, expressing and applying what was 
later to become a distinguishing feature of 
the Western world : the right of the individual 
to be heard in matters civil and religious. 
"In politics they leaned toward Democracy," 
comments Fiske in writing of these early 
Protestants. One cannot imagine a more 
fatal circumstance than that which placed 
such a people in such an environment. Even 
had they been able to accommodate themselves 
to the idea of submission in religion and 



24 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

politics it would scarcely have solved their 
problem. There would still have remained 
the racial affinity which bound them to Europe 
and which at the time of the Crusades caused 
Melik Nasr, the Egyptian Sultan, to declare 
to Leo II, their king, who had applied to 
him for a treaty of peace: "I will never make 
peace with you until you promise on oath 
not to hold any correspondence or commu- 
nication with Western nations." The bond 
at that time was not solely rehgious: it was 
also social and commercial. It was due to the 
instinctive sympathy of the people for their 
kin and for all that savored of progress. And 
even today this same spirit is making itself 
felt. At this very moment, poorly equipped 
and at the mercy of an absolutely pitiless foe, 
their influence in the Caucasus counts on the 
side of America and the Allies, and so it is 
in Mesopotamia, Palestine, France — wherever 
they are to be found. If there is an instance 
of similar ingrained constancy to heroic ideals 
under equally desperate conditions, history 
has not recorded it. May we not hereafter 
hear less of Armenia as victim and more of 
her as transcendent heroine? 



FROM CONVERSION TO CRUSADES 25 

To follow this story from the earliest 
Christian days to the time when the night of 
Turkish oppression settled upon the land is to 
traverse a period every whit as rugged and 
various, as picturesque and colorful, as were 
the most glorious days of the pagan era. If 
we pass over the trembling dawn of the 
Conversion and come to the fourth and fifth 
centuries, we shall see all over this still 
politically distracted period evidences of an 
intensification of the national spirit hitherto 
unexampled. 

Although divided at this time between 
Persia and Byzantium, the people, rising as 
one in response to the new ideal, mustered 
abundant evidence of the strength of their 
moral and intellectual power. With an un- 
compromising zeal — ^much to be regretted 
from the historical and artistic points of view 
— they succeeded in virtually obliterating all 
traces of their pagan life and culture. But 
they created in its stead another civilization. 
The pagan temples, and the connecting 
libraries, so rich in the archives of Idng and 
priest that histories had previously been 
compiled from them, were regrettably demol- 



26 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

ished. Fire altars and the golden statues of 
the divinities met with the same fate. But 
upon the spot where, according to Neumann, 
had stood a statue of Hercules, there rose the 
Mother Church of Armenia, and a new and 
Christian art came into being. In the noble 
architecture which was evolved, scholars see 
the foreshadowing of the Gothic ; in the music, 
poignant, austere, and characteristic, lies high 
evidence of esthetic power; but it is in the 
literature, which sprang into being almost 
miraculously, that we may most clearly see 
evidence of the fervid spiritual creativeness 
which the new life concept occasioned. 

In this aspect of the drama is foreshadowed 
in intensified and triumphant form that in- 
tellectual activity and hunger which was to 
be characteristic of the Armenians through- 
out their subsequent history. To Rome, to 
Athens, to Byzantium, to Alexandria, flocked 
the mature scholars and the aspiring students, 
just as during the modern renaissance they 
were to flock to the European and American 
centers of learning. The Armenian alphabet 
was invented at this time, as a more fitting 
medium by which to transcribe the thoughts 



FROM CONVERSION TO CRUSADES 27 

of the race than had been the foreign char- 
acters — Syriac, Greek, and Pelhevi — thitherto 
used by them. Great care was lavished upon 
the study of the Greek and Armenian tongues, 
and, as a result, the whole Bible had been 
incomparably translated from the Greek by 
the year 410, and the Golden Age of Arme- 
nian classic literature had begun. Moreover, 
the people had secured for themselves one of 
the greatest assets of national life, — a noble 
and subtle hterary language. Referring to 
this movement, Dr. D wight, the American 
Orientalist, says: 

"Rarely have men in any age or country 
made more energetic, praiseworthy and suc- 
cessful efforts in the cultivation of letters 
than those whose names are recorded in the 
annals of Armenian literature during the 
fourth and fifth centuries. Their names are 
and will be deserving of the most honorable 
remembrance wherever real merit is appre- 
ciated and the love of letters cherished." 

But Persia was viewing with increasing 
hostility this national awakening and rap- 
prochement with Europe. Already, accord- 



28 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

ing to historians, she had entered into secret 
alliance with India against the so-called 
Western principle. She rightly estimated 
that the Christian and progressive tendencies 
of the new order would alienate the Arme- 
nians irrevocably from the pagan tyi'annies. 
So she launched upon the country fierce re- 
ligious wars, and, in the name of her King, 
Hazgherd, summoned Armenia to renounce 
Christianity and pay fealty to Ormuzd, and 
the principle of Fire. She flooded the country 
with her armies, and Armenia, though lack- 
ing a central government of her own, took up 
the challenge. She organized a "popular 
movement," a Holy League and army com- 
posed of the heads of the ancient houses 
and the bishops of the Church and their 
followers and retainers, and sent forth this 
great army of Christian knights to meet the 
hosts of Persia. Already she was practising 
democratic action. On her side these were 
peoples' wars. 

On her spiritual victory over her first great 
religious foe there is not time to dwell. 
Suifice it to say that carnage and persecution 
only served to stamp the Christian ideal more 



FEOM CONVERSION TO CRTJSADES 29 

ineffaceably upon the hearts of the people, 
and that in 451 on the memorable field of 
Avarair, Persia finally recognized the futility 
of attempting religious coercion. Meanwhile, 
Byzantiimi, from afiiliation with whose church 
Armenia had separated at the Council of 
Chalcedon, had begun to prey more oppres- 
sively upon the harassed state where "two 
tides, that of the East and that of the West, 
strove for mastery." And so the civilization 
which the Armenians were developing re- 
ceived a sudden and serious check. But 
racially and religiously they withstood the 
onslaught, and, cheated of their political 
destiny at home, they sought in the service of 
their Byzantine foe and rival an outlet for 
their creative energies. And so victorious 
were they that according to Finlay, Bryce, 
Schlumberger, Rambaud, Bussell, Gelzer, 
and others, the Eastern Empire was for 
several centuries not Greek but Armenian. 
It was the Armenian Emperor Leo, known 
as the Image Breaker because of his icono- 
clasm, who commanded Home to destroy her 
images. He had been converted by the 



30 THE TEAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

Armenian Paul, to whom the Protestant sect 
of the Paulicians owes its name. 

But the most important event in connection 
with this peaceful conquest of Byzantium was 
the service which it enabled the Armenians 
to pay to Western civiHzation. They filled 
the civil offices and ofiicered the army, and 
Leo the Iconoclast was still emperor when 
the Saracens hurled against Constantinople 
the largest Mohammedan army ever assem- 
bled. "Of its 180,000 men, only 30,000 
got back home, according to Mohammedan 
authorities," says Finlay, and he adds: 
"Twenty-two years later, Leo annihilated 
another great Moslem army, and for two 
centuries the Saracens scarcely troubled the 
empire again." By this service, as momentous 
as was that of Charles Martel upon the field 
of Tours, the Armenians have placed the 
entire world in their debt. 

Meanwhile, in Armenia proper, we see the 
nation again rallying incredibly under a third 
dynasty of their own kings, the Pakradoonian, 
with Ani, the city of a thousand churches, as 
its capital. But we see, too, the old jealous 
Destiny at work. The Greeks, who had again 



FROM CONVERSION TO CRUSADES 31 

gained the ascendancy in Byzantium, warred 
upon this kingdom ceaselessly, actuated partly 
by their hostility towards the independent 
Armenian Church; and, finally, leaguing 
themselves with the Saracens, they compelled 
it to surrender (1045). 

And so the third Armenian dynasty fell, 
after an existence of three hundred years; 
and so were frustrated, as so often before, 
the efforts of the Armenian race to realize 
in freedom its own genius. Of the monu- 
ments which remain of this civilization. Lynch 
says that "they throw strong light upon the 
character of the Armenian people and bring 
into pronouncement important features of 
Armenian history," that "they denote a 
standard of culture far in advance of the 
contemporary standard in the West," and 
that "they leave no doubt that this people 
may be included in the small number of races 
susceptible of the highest culture." 

But Byzantium herself was to rue the fatal 
downfall of the Pagratids. Just as she was 
triumphing over their humiliation, there 
loomed upon the horizon great hosts of tribes- 
men from Mongolia and Tartary, as if in 



32 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

prophecy of the vengeance which should 
follow. Alp Arslan, the precursor of Genghis 
Khan, Ertoghrul, and Othman, suggested, 
could she but have read the lesson, the sub- 
sequent capture of her own capital city by 
Mohammed II and her own overthrow. In 
helping to destroy the Pakradoonian king- 
dom, she had shattered "the advance guard 
of Christian civilization in the East," and 
had opened the way to the invading foe. 

With fate so much against them, the 
Armenians might now have retired from 
further contest and still, having survived the 
Assyrians, the Babylonians — and the Jews, 
upon the home ground — be reckoned a mar- 
velously tenacious race. But they were not 
to retire. The old obstinacy of purpose, the 
old deathless courage of their ancestors still 
mastered them, and inspired certain feudal 
princes to still another attempt at establishing 
an Armenian state. One of these, Rhupen 
of the Mountain, a cousin to the Pakradoonian 
kings, set up, on the heights of the Tau- 
rus overlooking the Mediterranean, another 
Armenian kingdom, known both as the King- 



FROM CONVERSION TO CRUSADES 33 

dom of Lesser Armenia and as the Kingdom 
of Cilicia, and by open and definite alignment 
with Eiu'ope, proved anew the singular cos- 
mopolitan bias, the keen political vision of 
the racial stock. Attacked, besieged by Arabs 
and Tartars, intrigued against and even 
warred upon by Byzantium, the Rhupenian 
dynasty maintained its existence for three 
hundred years, and shaped for itself a strik- 
ingly liberal policy. Armenians were sent 
to colonize in Italy. Italians were welcomed 
in Cilicia. Active commercial relations were 
entered upon between the two countries, the 
governmental administration was perfected, 
so that in the thirteenth century Marco Polo, 
who visited it, was able to report that it "was 
governed with much justice and economy," 
and that "the port, Payas, was the magazine 
of all the precious merchandise and of all 
the wealth of the Orient." And when the 
Rhupenian line failed for want of an heir, 
the nation, for political purposes, invited a 
Latin prince of the French family of Lusignan 
to occupy the throne. 

The Crusades had early offered to this 
Kingdom a signal opportunity for open 



84 THB TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

advocacy of the Christian faith which it was 
not slow to accept. Regardless of their 
material safety, conscious only of the fact 
that spiritually and intellectually their destiny 
converged with that of Europe, the Armenians 
allied themselves to the Christian forces 
throughout the entire period "by lending aid 
in men, in horses, in arms, in food, in council" 
and "by acting as guides in the desert." The 
part they played in these struggles may be 
gauged by the recognition offered them by the 
popes and emperors of the period. On the 
other hand, their own expectation of succor 
may be gathered from this 12th century poem 
by the Armenian Nerses, called the Gracious, 
one of the nation's greatest poets and saints. 
The translation was made by Miss Zabelle 
Boyajian of London: 

THE CRUSADERS 

Once more God hither moves their course; 

With countless infantry and horse. 

As swell the waves towards the strand. 

Fierce and tempestuous, they land. 

Like sands that by the ocean lie. 

Or like the stars that strew the sky. 

They fill the earth where'er they go 



FROM CONVERSION TO CRUSADES 36 

And whiten it as wool or snow. 

Their voice is like the northern wind. 

Driving the storm-cloud from behind. 

They clear the land from end to end. 

The unbelievers forth they send. 

Redeeming from such hopeless plight 

All Christians held within their might. 

Now in the churches cold and dark. 

Once more shall burn the taper's spark; 

And you, my sons, late forced to flee 

To distant lands, afar from me. 

Shall now return in chariots fair 

Drawn by brave steeds with trappings rare. 

And I shall lift mine eyes above 

Beholding near me those I love. 

My arms about you I shall fold, 

Rejoicing with a joy untold; 

And my black robes aside will lay 

To dress in greens and crimsons gay. 

But, alas, although the Armenians put their 
all to the test, they were to see the hosts of 
Islam triumph. Weaker and weaker grew 
European resistance until at last, abandoned 
by the West, and in a terrible isolation, 
moral and military, the knights of Armenia 
stood alone upon their mountain tops and 
watched the crusading hosts recede never to 
return. 



36 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

The kingdom was obliged to surrender to 
the Sultans of Egypt, in 1375, and their last 
king was made captive. After his ransom 
by Spain, in vain did he go from France to 
England and from England to France, beg- 
ging these countries to mend their quarrels, 
to return to their task of defending Western 
civilization. His sagacious council was un- 
heeded. The barbaric hordes inundated 
Armenia — Major, Minor, and Lesser — and 
drew nearer and yet more near to Con- 
stantinople. 

An interminable succession of pictures 
throng upon the vision during this second 
grouping of the tragedy. The pageantry of 
the classic era made vivid to us by the histo- 
rian Egishe — the fortresses, the high seats of 
the palaces, the bridal chambers, the dining 
places with carven platter and other costly 
vessels of the table, the ushers by the door, 
the cup-holders at the festival, the flower 
gardens and vineyards, the hunting excur- 
sions, the councils of the bishops and princes, 
the heroism of the battlefields — all dissolve 
and in their place come the glories of the 



FROM CONVERSION TO CRUSADES 37 

foreign service at Byzantium, the triumph 
and the defeat of the Kingdom of Ani and 
the brilliancy and eclipse of the Kingdom of 
Cilicia. The scenes are invested with all the 
romance and glamour of the medieval period 
of Europe. Feudal virtues and feudal ex- 
cesses characterize the social life. Great 
houses clash with one another, betray one 
another, display vengeance and hostility as 
well as splendid generosity and superhuman 
courage. The mountain heights are bristling 
with battlements. Armies swarm in the defiles 
and on the plains. The whole period surges 
with activity. 

And yet, amid all the political strife and 
discord, there is room for Art to make its 
wonderful way; not only that of the classic 
period already referred to, not only in the 
architecture of the Kingdom of Ani, or in the 
beautiful anthems, liturgy and formal litera- 
ture of the Church, but in a wonderful lyric 
poetry which graced especially the medieval 
period, and in many fascinating forms of 
purely decorative art.^ The lyrical poetry of 
medieval Armenia has been declared by 
Mr. Valery Brussov, a contemporary Russian 



38 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

authority, to be "among the treasures of the 
world," and the genius of her decorative 
artists is evident from the wonderful carvings 
in stone, wood, ivory, and metal which they 
have left. Old tombstones, croziers, walls, 
cups, exhibit a workmanship the spirit and 
technique of which has been the inspiration 
of similar work in Europe. To Armenia, too, 
the origins of cloisonne enamel are traced. A 
type of picture called by the Armenians 
"thought-work," and made by the applica- 
tion of bits of fabric of different colors 
upon a plain background, is said to have so 
delighted Botticelli that he introduced it to 
Italy and made use of the idea in church 
decoration. In days precarious but still irra- 
diated by the "fighting chance" these offeriags 
to beauty formed a significant part of the 
background of the changing scenes. And we 
infer from their presence human happiness 
and rapture, gaiety and love. 

Among the myriads of characters who defile 
across the stage we dimly discern the apostles, 
Thaddeus and Bartholomew, and the Princess 
Santoukhd and other martyrs who offered up 
their Hves in the first faint dawn of Chris- 



FROM CONVERSION TO CRUSADES 39 

tianity. We see Ripsime, the beautiful Roman 
virgin, and her companions, who, to escape 
the attentions of the Emperor Diocletian, 
"took refuge in the outskirts of the Armenian 
capital, Vagharshapat," only to enkindle the 
desire of King Tiridates, from whom she 
also fled, to be later captured and finally 
executed for her noble obstinacy; we see the 
great Illuminator, Gregory, we see warrior 
bishop, Puritan democrat, feudal lord, scholar, 
artist, merchant, emperor, soldier. Red Cross 
knight, — all of Armenian race. We see, in 
his olive wreath, the Armenian Varastad, 
victor of the last Olympian game; Proeresius, 
the rhetorician, to whom Rome erected a 
statue with the following inscription, Regina 
rerum Roma regi eloquentiae; and generals 
and statesmen who add glory to Byzantium. 
Harun al Raschid, Conrad of Wittlesbach, 
Raymond of Toulouse, Godfrey of Bouillon, 
Bohemond, Tancred, Frederick Barbarossa, 
Richard the Lion-Hearted, Saladin, give 
place before our eyes to the frightful forms 
of Alp Arslan, Genghis Khan, and Tamer- 
lane. And, throughout, whether against 
Persian tyrant, Saracen, Mongol, or Turk, 



40 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

we see massed the solid legions of the 
Armenian people, who not only met the 
enemy valiantly on countless battlefields, but 
who, as martyrs to the ideals of Christianity 
and nationality, laid down their lives heroi- 
cally, simply, and as a matter of course. 



Chapter III 

UNDER TURKISH DOMINATION 
AND THE SPIRITUAL 

RENAISSANCE 

THE "noble singleness of feature" which 
marked the moral aspect of the preced- 
ing stages of the drama, persists with a 
growing majesty and poignancy in the final 
stages. The loss by the Amienians of every 
vestige of political and military power raises 
the plane of action to that of the naked spirit 
in battle with brute force, ignorance, mate- 
rialism, intrigue and treachery. In a sense, 
it becomes an issue between one httle imarmed 
nation and the world. And as the protago- 
nists other than Turkey enter — Christian 
Europe, and, in a remote and non-official 
way, Christian America — the concentration 
of interest, expectation, suspense, terror, 
loathing, shame, disappointment, and pity, 
mount to heights of intolerable intensity. 
The striking elements of beauty which still 
remain are aU but lost in a chaos of the revolt- 



42 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

ing and the sordid, the disgraceful and heart- 
rending. 

The pagan period of the drama was marked, 
it is true, by immense political and military 
contests and upheavals and by all the horrors 
of foreign invasions. But these were the lot 
of most peoples in the days of early martial 
society. And while, as Lord Byron said, "it 
would be difficult to find the annals of a 
nation less stained with crimes than those of 
the Armenians," still they gave and took 
with the rest to some extent, and under 
Tigranes, at least, became a really imperial 
power. And the very fact that as a people 
they survived the military inundations of the 
great Oriental tyrannies which obliterated so 
many of their neighbors, and that they suc- 
ceeded in maintaining and developing a 
civilization of their own, tinges the ordeal 
with all the luster of triumph. 

The second period, too, although marked 
by severe and continuous religious and 
political persecution and the destruction of 
the attainments of two comparatively long 
and successful dynasties, is still flooded with 
the glory of action and conspicuous achieve- 



UNDER TURKISH DOMINATION 43 

ment. In the Aryan Persians, as in the 
Romans and Byzantines, the Armenians 
could recognize ethnic similarity, and extract 
from these conquerors a kind of moral tribute 
in the way of a quasi autonomy. The Sara- 
cens — ^Arab or Egyptian — ^were likewise of a 
highly evolved racial type. And there was a 
possibihty even here for reciprocal adjust- 
ments. 

But the race to which they now fell victim 
were marauding nomads from Central Asia, 
possessing no culture of their own, and of 
an inferior mentality. Whatever religion 
they may once have followed they speedily 
discarded in favor of a corrupted form of 
Islam, in the sword-worshiping, world-con- 
quering aspects of which they saw reflected 
their own basic instincts. The six centuries 
which have elapsed since their coming and 
the power which they have enjoyed, have 
only served to prove their brutality and 
their worthlessness as factors in civilization. 
Plunder, murder and rape were and still are 
their main incentives to action, and their 
iniquities and incompetence have been pro- 



44 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

vocative of endless wars, of which the present 
holocaust is but the logical culmination. 

During the first three or more hundred 
years of this domination, the Armenians as 
a people were practically blotted out from 
the annals of history. Europe, unable or 
unwilling to contest the supremacy of the foe 
in Asia, had turned from the blighted East 
to the wonders of her own renaissance, and, 
except for her terrific struggles with the Turk 
as he encroached more and more upon the 
heart of her own territory, lent no direct 
assistance to the beleagured frontier. In vain 
did the popes preach new crusades. Byzan- 
tium was allowed to fall almost unaided. 
Eastern Christendom, as such, was forgotten. 

The last Armenian dynasty had surrendered 
to the Sultans of Egypt just seventy-eight 
years before the capture of Constantinople. 
If the greater power had been unable to 
withstand the assaults of the foe, if massacre 
was the lot of masses of the Greeks and 
servitude the destiny of the survivors, how 
must it have fared with this people who 
lacked any semblance of political cohesion, 
in the days when Mohammed II was turning 



UNDER TURKISH DOMINATION 46 

churches into mosques, and threatening to 
feed oats to his horse from the high altar of 
St. Peter's? 

Except for the inhabitants of certain moun- 
tain regions difficult of access — two of which, 
Zeitoun and Sassoun, retained a rough inde- 
pendence until the present war — the Arme- 
nians were subjected everywhere to the rav- 
ages of fire, sword, pillage, and enslavement. 
Then, as now, love of plunder rather than 
love of Islam was the motive which led the 
soldiers to these extreme excesses. Four- 
fifths of all the loot accrued to them; the 
remaining fifth went to the Emperor. Conse- 
quently all the inhabitants, high and low, were 
stripped of their possessions. Kesistance was 
impossible. 

But even while the people of the homeland 
were being massacred and enslaved, the 
Armenians of the Dispersion, it is well to 
remember, were continuing to play their im- 
memorial part in the war between Liberty 
and Tyranny, Civilization and Barbarism. 
"In 1410," writes Tchobanian, "all the Arme- 
nian nobility [of Poland whither they had 
emigrated in the 11th century] fought with 



46 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

the armies of Ladislas Jagello, and in the 
battle of Grundwaldt contributed to the vic- 
tory. [The war between Poland and Prussia] . 
In 1683, in the great war of the Austrians 
against the Turks, five thousand Armenian 
soldiers fought valiantly with King Sobieski 
at the gates of Vienna." 

Meanwhile, in Turkey, amid the appalling 
domestic decadence, moral and material, which 
attended the barbaric reigns of the successive 
Sultans; under the terrific strain of constant 
and burdensome wars undertaken by the 
usurpers against Europe, Persia, and Egypt; 
scattered unarmed among a foe whose author- 
ity was swiftly and summarily enforced by 
the scimitar, by poison, by the rope, by 
strangulation, by imprisonment; a foe which 
took the savage's delight in devising new 
methods of torture, and which claimed re- 
ligious sanction for all abominations inflicted 
upon the Giaours (infidels) ; amid this in- 
credible orgy of license and cruelty, which, 
in the earlier days, had struck terror into 
the hearts of free and powerful peoples, the 
Armenians, with a tenacity as amazing as 



UNDER TURKISH DOMINATION 47 

characteristic, gradually resumed in impres- 
sive, though in far humbler form, something 
of the old role of intellectual and practical 
leadership which at other times in their his- 
tory had resulted in the conquest of their 
conquerors. 

Banned from the army, their word refused 
m courts of law, the women subject to seizure, 
their property to confiscation upon no provo- 
cation, taxed to the utmost, they nevertheless 
succeeded in maintaining some kind of civil 
and social fabric for the wastrels who had 
overpowered them. They were the bankers, 
artists, traders, artisans, and farmers; but 
even as they conducted the commerce, plied 
the trades, tilled the fields, built the marble 
palaces, filled those administrative posts 
which demanded constructive ability, went 
as ambassadors to foreign countries, and in 
all ways augmented the resources of the State, 
they were, as a people, despised and outlawed 
by their idle and arrogant masters who looked 
upon them as "rayahs'' fit only to be ex- 
ploited; and in secret and in silence the noble 
traditions of their own race and religion took 
deep and deeper root. 



48 THE^TRAGBDY OF ARMENIA 

During these centuries of enslavement, the 
Armenian race lost much by migrations, 
forced and voluntary. Europe, India, and 
Persia claimed the ambitions of many of the 
ablest. Evidence of the early Armenian 
dispersion in Em^ope is to be found in the 
fact that books in Armenian characters 
were printed as early as 1488 at Venice and 
Amsterdam, and at Lembourg, Milan, Paris, 
Marseilles, Leipzig, and Padua, during the 
years of the two succeeding centuries. They 
are said to have founded the city of Calcutta. 
Certain it is that they rose to wealth and 
influence in the life of British East India in 
general, and that they enjoyed privileges 
there usually reserved for Englishmen alone. 
We hear of them as "prime ministers" to the 
native princes; and as confidential servants 
to the British crown. 

The songs of homesickness, or of longing 
for the emigrant, which appear at this time, 
testify to the sufferings and losses inflicted 
by these migrations. A melancholy settled 
upon the spirit of the people. It is felt in 
their music. It throbs in their poetry. "No 
Christian dare look a Turk in the face," 



UNDER TURKISH DOMINATION 49 

commented a European traveler who was one 
of the first to cross the gulf which had sep- 
arated the country from the West since the 
Turkish occupation. The scimitar and the 
bludgeon of the Turk had indeed overawed 
the defenceless Christian populations. There 
was no contesting the might of his brutal force. 
But the Armenians had a higher daring. 
They alone, of all the peoples of Asia which 
had fallen beneath his yoke, had achieved the 
miracle of retaining the four great essentials 
of national life — racial purity, racial customs, 
religious integrity, and language. Even the 
soul of the once formidable Persia, which 
had been Mohammedanized by the Saracens, 
and which had come indirectly under Turkish 
influence, had lost its ancient characteristics. 
While the Chaldeans, the Ghebers, the 
Syrians, and, in Egypt, the Copts, had lost 
language, religion, or national traditions, 
one or more, the Armenians, on the contrary, 
not only jealously retained all their distin- 
guishing features, but were to emerge at the 
end of the long struggle v/ith a national con- 
sciousness distinctly heightened. This fact 



50 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

more than any other, says De Morgan, 
"entitles them now to a national re-birth." 

The best that can be said of this period of 
bondage is that it taught the people endurance 
and reliance upon one another. Persecution 
brought the cohesion which their independent 
nature and the mountainous character of 
their country had tended to disrupt. Because 
of religious exclusiveness and sane habits of 
life they had suffered no racial degeneracy. 
Together with their intellectual vigor they 
had managed to retain their primitive physical 
strength. It was, on the whole, a fine race 
which had survived the conquest and captivity.* 
Men and women there were of many types 
of form and of countenance; numbers tall 
and well knit, with faces of the distinctively 
Armenian cast: — lofty and, among the men, 
even massive foreheads, high noses, straight 
or aquiline, dark eyes, and hair abundant 
and black; their complexions and lips vivid 
with the rich color lent them by the brilliant 
sun and pure air of the great tableland and 
of the mountainous region of Cilicia; their 
demeanor grave and reposeful, reminiscent of 
the dignity of their neighbors of India. Others 



UNDER TURKISH DOMINATION 61 

there were who showed traces of the Semitic 
strain which had mingled with the race during 
the dim days of the Babylonian captivity and 
at other periods of their history. Less repose 
but more vivacity marked their features. Not 
infrequently there appeared another type, 
more blooming but more delicate, of fairer 
and rosier skin, and more languorous air. And 
again it was not uncommon to see faces of a 
heavier cast which suggested descent from 
the tribes of the Kingdom of Ararat, the 
original Uradhu, which Haig had overcome. 
A similar variety one observes among all the 
European races. 

These men and women had given to each 
other in monogamous marriage all those 
affections and loyalties which make family 
life devoted and high. Husband and wife, 
parents and children, sister and brother, 
stood by one another with a patriarchal sim- 
plicity and fervor. The children of the house- 
holds were lovingly and wisely nurtured, and 
the old people honored. In their own homes 
and in theu' own churches they observed un- 
noticed their national and religious festivals. 
And in their own schools, which they 



52 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

themselves maintained, the more favored 
of the people received the education which 
their limited opportunities afforded. The 
knowledge of their past glories and of their 
ancient and medieval literatures were veiled 
from them, partly through the evolution of 
their language from the classic to the modem, 
partly through the scarcity of books, but 
more largely through the opposition of their 
masters to all that savored of enlightenment. 
The weight of the oppressor was so great and 
circumstances so hostile as almost to extin- 
guish the aggressive intellectualism which has 
always been their dominant trait. Since the 
downfall of their last dynasty they had 
suffered all the crippling disabilities of a 
proscribed race. The production of a new 
literature was all but impossible. 

But while body and soul were thus in bond- 
age, the spirit of liberty and light which had 
guided the destiny of the race in other days 
was not without its testimony. Toward the 
close of the eighteenth century two great 
figures appear, one an incarnation of the 
political, the other of the cultural, genius of 
the Armenian race. It is evident through the 



UNDER TURKISH DOMINATION 53 

career of Israel Ori that the dream of an inde- 
pendent Armenia had never completely faded, 
and that the fierce love of freedom which had 
characterized the feudal nobility had not 
wholly waned in their descendants. 

Israel Ori was of Persian and not of Turk- 
ish Annenia, but his heroic scheme of political 
emancipation was intended to apply to all 
the Armenians who had come under the power 
of the tyrannical Mussulmans of the East. 
lie was one of a group of Armenian meliks 
(hereditary princes) of the province of 
Karabagh, a mountainous district which, 
although paying tribute to Persia, had main- 
tained a semi-autonomy. These men "yearned 
to enter upon a new era of freedom" and 
dared to take bold steps to secure that end. 
After repeated efforts at self-liberation the 
nobility of the rebellious principalities decided 
to send Ori as their representative to the 
courts of Europe with the object of soliciting 
the "aid and protection of the Powers," in the 
furtherance of the revolt at home. After 
twenty long years of unflagging effort, he 
finally succeeded in obtaining formal promises 
of help from the Emperor Leopold and Peter 



54 THE TRAGEDY OP ARMENIA 

the Great. And although the outbreak of the 
Russo-Swedish war prevented the consumma- 
tion of the project, the episode is none the less 
most significant in the life of the nation. It 
is more than a drama within a drama. It is 
part of the old sequence, and a prophecy of 
what was yet to follow. For we see fore- 
shadowed in the patient but dauntless char- 
acter of the chief actor, the patriots who were 
to plead the cause of their race so bravely 
and so steadfastly in the nineteenth and 
twentieth centuries. 

The other great figure of this era of 
awakening is Mekhitar, an Armenian monk — 
a convert to Catholicity — who, realizing that 
he could accomplish nothing for his race 
should he remain in Turkey, left that be- 
nighted country for Venice, where, under the 
patronage of the Pope, he founded the great 
Armenian monastery and outpost of learning 
known as the Convent of St. Lazar. Here he 
and the brotherhood of Armenians whom he 
drew about him began their great work of 
editing and publishing the ancient works of 
the forefathers which they had brought with 
them in their ancient manuscript form. Here 



UNDER TURKISH DOMINATION 55 

they wrote original histories and other books 
and compiled grammars and dictionaries. 
Here they translated the works of the 
writers of the Western world, of modern 
days and of antiquity. It was this move- 
ment which ushered in the sublime but ill- 
fated modern renaissance. Not only was 
knowledge of the deeds of the gi'eat kings 
who had gained for them nationality, and of 
the great saints who had brought them Chris- 
tianity, made common property, not only 
were the splendid traditions of Ararat, Ani, 
and Cilicia revived; the mind of the people 
was brought into contact with the mind of 
Europe, and especially with that of France, 
so that by the middle years of the nineteenth 
century all the best modern theories and 
philosophies had their ardent votaries among 
these outcast subjects of the besotted and 
reactionary Ottoman State. Gradually the 
race very generally began to exhibit tokens 
of its old eager creativeness. 

Other causes contributed to this awakening 
of the national spirit. The vivifying in- 
fluence of Europe and America was felt in 
the persons of the statesmen, travelers, mer- 



56 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

chants and scholars, and — above all — ^mission- 
aries and teachers who began to penetrate the 
country. Although these were of the race of 
the Crusaders, they knew nothing of these 
ancient allies of their forefathers, and were 
not prepared to meet a race so congenial of 
spirit, so dynamic and original of mind. 
"They are the Dutch of the East," wrote 
Dulaurier. "They are like the Swiss," said 
Lamartine. "We have found the Yankees of 
the East," exclaimed the American mission- 
aries who had gone to the country for 
the purpose of converting the Mohammedan 
Turk. 

Schools began to multiply, Armenian as 
well as American and French. The rajp- 
prochement with the West was further 
accelerated by the number of students, who, 
in the universities of Europe and America, at 
the Venetian monastery of St. Lazar, and at 
the sister house which had been established 
at Vienna, felt the divine flame of the rising 
civilization which their own ancestors had 
done so much to kindle and to foster. Not in 
the degraded concepts of Turkey, but in the 
visions of the aspiring West, did the Armenian 



UNDER TURKISH DOMINATION 57 

spirit find fellowship and affirmation. It was 
evident that such a people could not longer 
endure the blighting limitations and exactions 
of the Turkish yoke. 



Chapter IV 

THE RISE 

AND INFLUENCE OF THE NEAR 

EASTERN QUESTION 

THE modern Near Eastern Question was 
a weighty factor in the efflorescence of 
light and hope which revealed to the 
Armenians of the later nineteenth century all 
the degradation and horror of the Turkish 
domination, just as it was the chief force in 
the determination of the last, most terrible, 
and most piteous phase of the entire Arme- 
nian tragedy. In so far as it was concerned 
with the treatment of Christians in general, 
in the Near East, it was but a resumption of 
the ancient discussion begun by Charlemagne 
and Harun al Raschid. This has been a 
courtly, and, on the whole, a satisfactory 
correspondence, as were afterwards the inter- 
changes between the Christian knights and 
the mighty Saladin. But the Turks were of 
another order, and the motives of the Western 
intercessors, too, had very radically changed. 
The espousal of the Christian cause by 



THE NEAR EASTERN QUESTION 59 

Kussia, her assumption of the r6le of pro- 
tector of the Christians of the East officially- 
conferred upon her in 1774 by the Treaty of 
Kainardje, has, in spite of its obvious ulterior 
motive, something of the old chivalrous flavor 
of the Middle Ages. And this glamour of a 
semi-disinterested championship she somehow 
consistently managed to sustain until the 
coming to power of the reactionary Alex- 
ander III. In the face of her actual accom- 
plishment and the fact that the wars she 
waged time after time on behalf of the Balkan 
Christians brought her no substantial increase 
in territory, we can hardly say that her 
motives were unmitigatedly sordid. We must 
make some possible allowance for Kussian 
mysticism and ideality, and admit the possi- 
bility of a rude Christian esprit de corps in 
this uncouth nation, so late in coming under 
the "rationalizing" influence of the West. 
Or, even if we must suspect that her motives 
were alwaj^^s wholly selfish, we are obliged to 
admit that they none the less served most 
excellent ends. 

However this may be, the revival of interest 
in the forgotten East on the part of the other 



60 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

European powers was nothing if not frankly 
utilitarian. It is certain that they did not 
even play at dragon-killing. From the first, 
they recognized the iniquities of Turkish rule, 
especially as it affected the subject Christians, 
but they took no more than an academic 
interest in the matter. They had outgrown 
niysticism and sentimentality, and had be- 
come out and out opportunists, at least so 
far as foreign policies were concerned. With 
economic and territorial expansion as the 
guiding governmental motives, it was natural 
that the point of view of the Crusader should 
give way to that of the adept in diplomacy, 
the broker, the militarist. Especially after 
the first quarter of the nineteenth century 
did the relation between the West and the 
Turkish empire take on the definite char- 
acter of a politico-economic gamble. Neither 
the religion nor the national aspirations of the 
Christian races were of any moment in the 
eyes of the great imperialisms, whatever these 
might mean to the more idealistic men and 
women of the respective home populations. 

A corresponding change of outlook had not 
occurred among the Christians of Turkey. 



THE NEAB EASTERN QUESTION 61 

There the issues of Christianity and of 
Nationality were still keen and vital, and the 
love and longing for freedom in these impor- 
tant respects were still intense because of 
centuries of denial on the one hand, and of 
vahant affirmation on the other. Besides, the 
Christians of the East, even the Armenians, 
although in the earlier days of their history 
as noted for their commercial genius as were 
the Phoenicians, and, in their later days, as 
are the Anglo-Saxons and the Jews, were 
practically untouched by that scientifically 
relentless commercial spirit of the Mechanical 
Age which had transformed Europe. Even 
the shrewdest bankers and business men were 
unsophisticated and primitive in their outlook 
when compared with this new type of financier 
and statesman which was evolving in the West 
and which reckoned personal and national 
profits in terms of politico-economic exploita- 
tion. Their dreams of liberation were founded 
upon quite another and simpler scheme of 
life. 

Moreover, the masses of the Armenian 
people were farmers and tradesmen, — prac- 
tical, frugal, shrewd, but, strange as it may 



62 THE TRAGEDY OP ARMENIA 

seem, simple, and, in spite of a subtle 
native discernment, confiding. They idealized 
Europe. They respected her as a co-religion- 
ist, and admired her as the exemplar of 
Progress and establisher of Law. In spite of 
themselves, they could not help looking to her 
for ultimate redemption. The fact that the 
prophets and peoples of Europe and the 
narrow governing circles were two distinct 
propositions, neither the Christians of Turkey- 
in-Asia nor those of the Balkans seem ever 
fully to have grasped. In the Armenian 
struggle, this vain but persistent hope of a 
chivalrous European intervention adds the 
crowning torture to the culminating disasters 
which were to overtake them with almost 
annihilating force. 

So much for the new factors which entered 
to complicate an already involved and des- 
perate situation. On its political side, the 
contest resolved itself into a question either 
of the control or dismemberment of Turkey 
by one or more of the European powers or 
her own self-redemption. Her own corrup- 
tion and incompetence, largely, had fashioned 



THE NEAR EASTERN QUESTION 63 

the impasse. J^^aturally, as an integral part 
of Turkey-in-Asia, the Armenians were chiefly 
concerned with internal reform. Unlike the 
Balkan nationalities, with them, as Viscount 
Bryce remarks, "The alternative to an Otto- 
man State was not an Armenian State, but a 
partition among the Powers, which would 
have ended the ambitions of Turk and Arme- 
nian alike. The Powers concerned were quite 
ready for a partition, if only they could agree 
upon a division of the spoils. This common 
inheritance of the Armenians and the Turks 
was potentially one of the richest countries 
in the Old World, and one of the few that 
had not yet been economically developed. 
The problem for the Armenians was not how 
to overthrow the Ottoman Empire but how to 
preserve it, and their interest in its preserva- 
tion was even greater than that of their 
Turkish neighbors and co-heirs. . . . Talent 
and temperament had brought most of the 
industry, commerce, finance and skilled in- 
tellectual work of Turkey into the Armenians' 
hands. And if the Empire were preserved by 
timely reforms from within, the position of 
the Armenians would become still more 



64 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

favorable, for they were the only native 
element capable of raising the Empire 
economically, intellectually and morally to 
a European standard, by which alone its 
existence could permanently be secured." 

Consequently, the Armenians were bent 
upon securing such reform. The constitution 
drawn up in '76 by the Armenian statesman, 
Krikor Odian, Secretary to the Turkish 
reformer, Midhat Pasha, which was pro- 
claimed and then immediately revoked by 
Sultan Abdul Hamid, would have served 
this end. But the Government, blind to its 
own interest, and radically unable to see the 
legitimacy of reform demands — especially as 
they affected Christians — persisted in its 
suicidal policy of oppression. After every 
such demand it became more cruel and re- 
actionary than ever. 

However, there is a certain inexorable law, 
made axiomatic by the great Irish liberator, 
O'Connell, which we must not lose sight of. 
When all is said, we know that in exigencies 
of this sort "he who would be free, himself 
must first strike the blow." And we are 
likely to inquire if, other than by an occa- 



THE NEAR EASTERN QUESTION 65 

sional humble protest or petition, the Arme- 
nians of these modern days in any way proved 
themselves worthy to be ranked with the 
other heroic peoples — the Greeks, the Serbs, 
the Rumanians, the Bulgarians — who through 
storm and stress had been partly the means 
of effecting their own liberation from the 
Turkish yoke. 

Considering that from the beginning of the 
Turkish domination the Armenians had never 
been permitted to bear or to possess arms; 
considering that they were widely scattered 
among watchful Turkish and Kurdish popu- 
lations, it is by no means a fair question. 
Still, it is well for us to realize that in spite 
of these formidable handicaps — and aside 
from the so-called "revolutionary" movement, 
undertaken only as a last resort, and then 
with the desperate understanding that only 
by the help of Europe could it in any way 
avail — the Armenian race, owing to the genius 
and courage of a number of its own sons in 
the service of Hussia, did actually secure a 
virtual emancipation from the most intolerable 
of their wrongs, but that the fruits of this 
victory were deliberately destroyed by the 



66 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

very Powers to whom they had most right to 
look for sympathy. 

It was the Russo-Turkish war of '76-'78 
which brought to the Armenians this oppor- 
timity. At the beginning of the century a 
portion of Armenia proper, the Caucasian 
district, had come under the dominion of the 
Czar. And the people thus freed from 
Turkish toils sprang to a height of material 
and moral prosperity sufficient to prove the 
artificial nature of their retardation in the 
interior of Asia Minor. Macler, De Morgan, 
Lynch, Bryce, all testify to the economic 
development of the region which they in- 
habited, once they had obtained even a 
measure of freedom. De Morgan states that 
under their hands the province became within 
a comparatively few years one of the most 
prosperous in all Russia. 

But more significant even than this demon- 
stration of economic power was the moral 
flowering of the people. Stimulated by their 
own liberties, by study in the Russian 
universities, and by contact with Russian, 
German, and French thought, the race pro- 
duced a succession of patriots, warriors, ' 



THE NEAR EASTERN QUESTION 67 

thinkers, dramatists, novelists, and poets, of 
whom any race on earth might be proud. 
Europe, and especially France, is coming to 
know — largely through the efforts at Paris 
of Mr. Archag Tchobanian and Professor 
Frederic Macler, professor of Armenian at 
UEcole des Langues Orientates Vivantes — 
something of the genius of this galaxy of 
writers. And the English-speaking world, 
through the labors of Miss Alice Stone 
Blackwell, Miss Zabelle Boyajian, Mr. Hobert 
Arnot and others, is coming to know some- 
thing of the poetry. But, as a potential 
factor in the life of the nation, no Armenian 
figure of the Caucasus can claim anything 
like the significance which invests the person 
of Loris Melikoff, confidante and advisor to 
Alexander II, who, with other Armenian 
generals, constituted the High Command of 
the Hussian army on the Caucasian front in 
that momentous war. 

The Turks were superior in numbers to 
the Russians, but, under the inspired direc- 
tion of those men who felt that they were 
defending the old home ground, they were so 
decisively repulsed as to be constrained to 



68 THE TEAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

comply with the vigorous but not ungenerous 
terms dictated to them by Kussia in the Treaty 
of San Stefano. When we remember that 
Mehkoff was yet to draft a constitution for 
Russia — which Czar Alexander was on the 
eve of proclaiming at the time of his assassi- 
nation — that he was statesman as well as 
general, and that he was the greatest figure 
of the victorious war, we can easily recognize 
the influence of his hand in the sixteenth 
article of the Treaty of San Stefano which, 
under strong military guarantee, assured 
redemption to the Armenians of the scandal- 
ously misgoverned interior provinces. 
The Article follows: 

"As the evacuation by the Russian troops of the 
territory which they occupy in Armenia, and which is 
to be restored to Turkey, might give rise to conflicts and 
complications detrimental to the maintenance of good 
relations between the two countries, the Sublime Porte 
engages to carry into effect, without further delay, the 
improvements and reforms demanded by local require- 
ment in the provinces inhabited by the Armenians, and 
to guarantee their security from Kurds and Circassians." 

This, of course, meant that not until 
the reforms had been consummated would the 



THE NEAR EASTERN QUESTION 69 

Russian troops be withdrawn. It was the 
first serious attempt that had been made 
by any European power on behalf of the 
Armenians, although such reform had been 
stipulated under the general heading "Chris- 
tian" in the Treaty of Paris, and had at times 
since been the subject of international dis- 
cussion. That the conditions demanded such 
drastic intervention is more than apparent 
from such testimony as that of C. B. Norman, 
then war-correspondent for the London 
Times, and numerous other foreign eye- 
witnesses : 

"In my correspondence to the Times," 
Mr. ISTorman writes, "I made it a rule to 
report nothing but what came under my own 
personal observation, or facts confirmed by 
European evidence. 

"A complete list it is impossible for me to 
obtain, but from all sides ... I hear piteous 
tales of the desolation that reigns throughout 
— villages deserted, towns abandoned, trade 
at a standstill, harvest ready for the sickle, 
but none to gather it in, husbands mourning 
their dishonored wives, parents their mur- 
dered children, churches despoiled and dese- 



70 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

crated, graves dug up, young of both sexes 
carried off, and the inhabitants of villages 
driven naked into the fields, to gaze with 
horror on their burning homesteads." 

There was but a brief moment, however, 
in which to rejoice and thank God for this 
long-sought deliverance promised by the 
Treaty of San Stefano. Hardly was their 
protection assured when England, already 
long committed to the so-called "integrity of 
Turkey" policy in the interests of her o^vn 
Eastern possessions, promptly interfered and 
demanded that the treaty drawn up by Russia 
be revised at an International Convention. 
Already, she had sent her fleet through 
the Dardanelles in threat of war should Russia 
insist upon following up her successes. 
Russia was in no position to take up the 
challenge, so she submitted to England's 
dictation. The Treaty of San Stefano was 
annulled and that of Berlin substituted. The 
fruits of the well-earned victory of the Rus- 
sians were effectively minimized. Incident- 
ally, Melikoff's signal triumph on behalf of 
his people was turned to black defeat. More 
vulnerable than ever they had been in all 



THE NEAR EASTERN QUESTION 71 

their history, the all but liberated Arme- 
nians were handed back to their infuriated 
tormentors. 

Still there remained a hope. By the 61st 
article of the Treaty of Berlin — secured chiefly 
through the efforts of an Armenian delega- 
tion headed by the ex-Patriarch Khrimian — 
the Six Great Powers, England, Germany, 
Austria, France, Italy, and Russia, had 
agreed to become the protector of the Arme- 
nians, although without any definite military 
guarantee. 

The Article read: 

"The Sublime Porte undertakes to carry out, without 
further- delay, the improvements and reforms demanded 
by local requirements in the provinces inhabited by the 
Armenians, and to guarantee their security against the 
Circassians and Kurds. It will periodically make known 
the steps it has taken to this effect to the Powers, who 
will superintend their application." 

Almost simultaneously, in secret conference 
with the Turkish Government, England had 
negotiated the Cyprus Convention, a treaty 
designed to secure both her own and Turkish 
interests against the further advance of 



72 THE TRAGEDY OP ARMENIA 

Russia. As one of the series of state docu- 
ments which bear most strongly upon the 
destiny of the Armenians it deserves to be 
cited here. I quote the main article: 

"If Batoum, Ardahan, Kars, or any of them shall be 
retained by Russia, and if any attempt shall be made 
at any future time by Russia to take possession of any 
further territories of His Imperial Majesty the Sultan 
in Asia, as fixed by the definitive Treaty of Peace, 
England engages to join His Imperial Majesty the 
Sultan in defending them by force of arms. 

"In return, His Imperial Majesty the Sultan prom- 
ises England to introduce necessary reforms, to be 
agreed upon later by the two Powers, into the govern- 
ment and for the protection of the Christian and other 
subjects of the Porte, in these territories; and in order 
to enable England to make necessary provision for 
executing her engagement His Imperial Majesty the 
Sultan further consents to assign the Island of Cyprus 
to be occupied and administered by England." 

Thus Russia was ousted from her position 
as special protector of the Christians of the 
East, and Europe collectively and England 
particularly assumed responsibility for the 
execution of reforms in Armenia. 

Once the Russian forces were withdrawn, the 



THE NEAR EASTERN QUESTION 73 

Sultan, as might have been expected, imme- 
diately began to inaugurate a policy of re- 
prisals which had for its aim nothing less than 
the total impoverishment and final extermina- 
tion of the Armenian population. He rightly 
discounted the sincerity of Europe with 
regard to the Armenians, and decided to 
eliminate this element whose presence and 
whose status necessitated reform and might 
later offer further pretext for foreign inter- 
vention. The first and most conspicuous step 
to this end was the organization into regular 
cavalry of the marauding Kurdish tribes, 
from whose depredations the Armenians had 
especially been promised protection. These 
were given power over their lives, honor and 
property. Then, taxes already unbearable 
were increased and ingeniously multiplied; 
travel, even from town to town for business 
purposes, was virtually prohibited; the collec- 
tion of debts from the non-Christian popula- 
tion was made impossible; imprisonment 
without trial and the open or secret murder 
of the leading men became common practices ; 
the abduction and violation of women were 
encouraged and connived at by the officials. 



74 THE TRAGEDY OP ARMENIA 

Mrs. Isabella Bird Bishop, the famous 
traveler, who visited Armenia in 1890, gives 
this report of the conditions prevailing at that 
time: 

"On the whole," she says, "the same condi- 
tion of alarm prevails among the Armenians 
as I witnessed previously among the Syrian 
(often called Nestorian) Rayahs. It is more 
than alarm, it is abject terror, and not with- 
out good reason. In plain English, general 
lawlessness prevails over much of this region. 
Caravans are stopped and robbed, travelling 
is, for Armenians, absolutely unsafe, sheep 
and cattle are being driven off, and outrages, 
which it would be inexpedient to narrate, are 
being perpetrated. Nearly all the villages 
have been reduced to extreme poverty, while 
at the same time they are squeezed for the 
taxes which the Kurds have left them with- 
out the means of paying." 

In vain in the midst of this reign of terror 
did the representatives of the people appeal 
over and over again to the Government for 
relief and redress. Finally, when it became 
only too evident that they were the victims 
of a vindictive design, they turned to the 



THE NEAR EASTERN QUESTION 75 

Signatory Powers on the basis of their Berlin 
Treaty rights. That they were justified in 
doing this is evident from the official testi- 
mony of the foreign consuls and ambassadors 
in innumerable Blue and Yellow books, from 
the protesting speeches delivered in the Euro- 
pean, and especially in the English and 
French parliaments, and from the representa- 
tions which the Powers made to the Porte. 

But, as we know, the Sultan, an adept in 
intrigue, took advantage of the jealousies of 
the Powers and played one off against the 
other while he continued his murderous policy 
with regard to the Armenians. There re- 
mained to the latter but one desperate chance. 
Some of the young men of the nation — many 
of whom had received their ideals from the 
prophets of Europe and America — organized 
themselves into patriotic societies for the sole 
purpose of self-defence. They managed to 
get possession of arms and were able success- 
fully here and there to resist the outrages and 
depredations. Only thus, they had been told, 
might they win the respect and attention of 
Europe and secure her intervention. 



76 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

We know what followed. The great 
massacres of '95 and '96 are still fresh in our 
minds. The tears for those unpunished crimes 
are yet upon the cheek, the shame is yet upon 
the brow, the agony is yet keen in the hearts 
of the great army of men and women of all 
races and nations who longed to arrest the 
murderous debauch but lacked the power to 
do so. The hills and valleys of the great 
tableland, the cities of the plains and of the 
sea coasts, even the capital city itself, dotted 
with foreign embassies, became the scene of 
a colossal butchery. In regions made sacred 
by the heroic defence of the Christian faith by 
this nation, its earliest adherent, the savage 
Turk was allowed to work his abhorrent will 
unchecked. The weaponless populations were 
visited with horrors which mankind had 
thought outgrown. 

But while the funeral pyre of a nation was 
being kindled; while a humanity which had 
flowered nobly in spite of insuperable diffi- 
culties was being thrown as dross into the 
flames by barbaric and sacrilegious hands; 
while white-haired men and women and those 
filled with all the energy of their best years, 



THE NEAR EASTERN QUESTION 77 

— fathers, mothers, brides, youths, maidens, 
and the angelic forms of little children who 
had but opened their trusting eyes upon this 
world, — ^were being sent to swell the hosts of 
martyrs to Christianity and to Freedom, the 
old frenzied cry of "Christ or Mohammed" 
ringing in their ears; upon the heights of old 
Zeitoun and amid the cliffs of Sassoun, where 
the race had preserved a scant immunity 
from Tui'kish power, there thundered forth 
the defiant voices of the ancient heroes in the 
shouts of the brave mountaineers, who, 
scantily armed, held the foe at bay for months 
to the marvel of the world. 

Zeitoun, a hill town of the old Rhupenian 
dynasty, refused to surrender until formal 
peace terms had been entered upon by Turkey, 
at the instance of the foreign ambassadors. 
And when at Sassoun the inevitable happened 
and the Turks came rushing up the heights, 
the women of the villages, with their babies 
in their arms, calling upon God to accept 
them as sacrifices, hurled themselves from the 
precipices rather than fall into the debasing 
hands of the foe. And, on the plains, the 
mother river, Euphrates, received other hun- 



78 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

dreds of women and maidens who, guarding 
their integrity as the pearl of greatest price, 
flung their bodies to her rescuing waves. 

It is no longer possible to summon up the 
individual forms which crowd the stage. The 
drama has burst its national bounds and has 
become world wide, even cosmic in its char- 
acter. We see two worlds, one of darkness 
and one of light, struggling for birth in the 
hearts and minds of men. The gigantic evils 
embodied in a succession of depraved sultans 
and temporizing world policies, made mani- 
fest by this great crisis, present issues and 
opportunities which call for potent and colossal 
heroes. But we see none. The aged Glad- 
stone's Cassandra-like warning, ''To serve 
Armenia is to serve Civilization'' evokes no 
response, except among those who, in indi- 
vidual capacity — like the noble American 
missionaries and other humanitarians — take 
up the great burden of terror and agony as if 
it were their own, and harbor, comfort and 
watch with the people, or, before the govern- 
ments and peoples of the world, cry out the 
story in all its shame and pity.^ And even 
them we cease to see. 



THE NEAR EASTERN QUESTION 79 

In this moment of stupendous cataclysm, 
when the fate not only of the Armenian 
nation, but of Civilization itself was trembling 
in the balance, while yet the nations had the 
power to deal the death blow to the power of 
Autocracy which was yet to ravage the world, 
it is as if the spirit of the Armenian nation, 
the prescience of these things and of the death 
of all her children upon her, took tangible 
form. We seem to see her rise with all her 
glorious past upon her. We see her turn 
horrified, dumbfounded and appealing eyes 
upon the six mighty Powers who had prom- 
ised to aid her. She, the Apostle of Chris- 
tianity, and its servant and defender, she, who 
had held back the Saracens in the days of her 
power, and had given of the might of her sons 
to the cause of the Crusades, she, a mother 
of Democracy, we see standing with bare, 
bleeding, outstretched hands in supplication 
to those children of the West, — the Six Great 
Knights, armed to the teeth, whose navies ride 
at will the oceans of the world, whose armies 
patrol the earth. We see her standing thus. 
But their great forms have become dwarfed, 
futile. Their eyes are averted ; their ears deaf. 



80 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

And then, her despairing eyes full of wild 
pleading, we see Armenia turn to America, 
to that fair Galahad among nations with the 
glory of his own great crusades for liberty 
still lighting his frank brow; to America, so 
friendly, so hospitable, so practiced in brother- 
hood, so determined to trample the evils in- 
herited from the Old World and to develop 
and add to all the good; whose spirit had 
visited her land and had created oases whither 
the hunted souls and bodies of her children had 
found comfort and refuge. Armenia in that 
awful moment looks into his beautiful face. 
She sees the young eyes appalled at the sight 
of her great suffering; she sees the generous 
hands extended full of bounty ; but she notices 
that though the scars of battle are upon his 
face, though the passion for justice is in his 
eyes, — the consciousness of his great mission 
has not yet fully dawned, — the knight is but 
an adolescent whose moment to enter the 
world's lists has not yet arrived.® 



Chapter V 
AFTER THE MASSACRES 

FROM this time on we see the rapid work- 
ings of the destiny which was finally to 
overtake not only the Armenians but 
the entire world as the result of the corrupt 
barbarism of Turkey and of iniquitous 
European diplomacy in the Near East. The 
appalling catastrophe which had fallen un- 
redressed upon the little Armenian nation — 
such is the contagion of unrebuked evil — ^was 
but the foreshadowing of the fate which was 
soon to overtake the Belgians, the Serbs, the 
Poles, and which was to exact the heavy 
blood tribute of France, of the British 
Empire, of Italy, and even of America, and 
to threaten the very existence of these free 
and powerful states. 

At the time the Western governments were 
thoroughly aware of their solemnly under- 
taken treaty obligations with regard to the 
Armenians, but to the worldly-wise mate- 
rialists who were then shaping the fortunes 



82 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

of our world it seemed "safer" to ignore than 
to fulfil them. One wonders if even the 
present cataclysm has convinced statesmen 
of this type that there are certain crimes 
against humanity which mankind may not 
tolerate and that the violation of this moral 
law carries with it its own inevitable doom. 

For the massacres of the Armenians did 
more than cry out for the decent type of 
statesmanship which today we recognize as 
imperative. They precipitated a stupendous 
crisis with regard to the much coveted estate 
of the Sick Man. The vain cry of Christian 
to Christian had revealed to the Sultan all 
too apparently the sole basis of European in- 
terest in the Near East. From henceforth he 
at least had nothing to fear from pseudo- 
Christian intervention. Hereafter, it was to 
be simply a pitched battle for the control of 
what Napoleon called the "Empire of the 
World," the region "which dominates the 
three continents upon which live ninety per 
cent of all mankind." And the Sultan was 
in a position to choose his partners. The 
increasingly conflicting ambitions, the moral 
cowardice and the venality of the Powers 



AFTER THE MASSACRES 83 

and his own corresponding arrogance made 
it only too evident that the old semi- 
respectable pre-massacre status could never 
be restored, and that the diplomacy shaped 
by the Great Crime might be hereafter as 
conscienceless as he and his chosen partners 
willed. 

As a matter of fact it was at this very 
time that Germany, capitalizing every ele- 
ment of the situation, even the blood of the 
victims, openly declared herself the friend 
and protector of the Sultan and of the whole 
Islamic world, and began to lay the sure 
foundation of her Drang nach Osten scheme 
— her push toward world conquest. Immu- 
nity from European intervention, no matter 
what his crimes, and eventually a great pan- 
Islamic empire were the alluring enticements 
which she offered to the Monster of Con- 
stantinople in return for the concession to 
build the longed-for Bagdad Railroad, so 
well named the "spine of the present war." 
And with such designs in prospect, the blood, 
not only of hundreds of thousands, but of 
millions of innocent human beings might well 
be permitted to cry in vain. 



84 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

We are familiar with the ghastly farce 
enacted by the Kaiser at Jerusalem, 
Damascus, and Constantinople. We see 
this successor to Frederick Barbarossa — that 
Crusader who sent the Crown to one of the 
princes of Lesser Armenia — paying equal 
homage to the tombs of Jesus, the world's 
Great Democrat and lover of his kind, whose 
"kingdom was not of this world," and to 
that of Saladin, the mighty Mohammedan 
conqueror and chief. We hear his specious 
words as he places a wreath upon the tomb 
of the "august Saracen whose sword had 
driven the Crusaders from Jerusalem forever." 

"I seize cheerfully upon this opportunity 
to express my gratitude to his Imperial 
Majesty, the Sultan Abdul Hamid, in whose 
sincere love for me I glory. I assure you 
that the German Emperor will be the loving 
friend of the great Sultan Abdul Hamid, 
as well as of the 300,000,000 Mohammedans 
who, dwelling dispersed throughout the East, 
reverence him as their Caliph." 

To cement this royal friendship, we see 
gifts exchanged between the two monarchs. 
On the one hand, all the costly Oriental 



AFTER THE MASSACRES 85 

carpets and other sumptuous furniture of 
the Palace in which the newly-made "Hadji" 
had been entertained; and on the other, a 
portrait of the German royal family, and a 
costly fountain donated to the Constantinople 
streets, still wet with the blood of 10,000 
Armenian martyrs. To such base uses had 
a portion of Christendom become openly 
converted ! 

But this was not all. In further evidence 
of the infectiousness of the rampant evil of 
this period, it is significant to note that it 
was at this time that Russia, weary of having 
all her "legitimate" imperial designs forever 
thwarted, decided to emulate the West, and 
to throw off all pretence at protecting the 
Eastern Christians. Almost immediately she 
began to adopt something like the Turkish 
attitude with regard to the Armenians of 
the hitherto happy region of the Caucasus 
with a view to their ultimate annihilation. 
"Armenia without the Armenians," the mur- 
derous 1895 slogan of Lobanoff, the Russian 
minister of Foreign Affairs, indicates the 
trend of the new pan- Slavic policy. Russia 



86 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

for the Russians, Turkey for the Turks, the 
world for Germany!^ 

And thus the barbaric doctrine of Ruth- 
lessness, fostered, we must admit, by the 
dishonorable compromises and moral inertia 
of the rest of the world, revived and spread. 
And for the Armenians all hope was lost 
except what they themselves might create 
and wrest from a situation which in itself 
was without hope. "Stranded in the East, 
this fragment of Europe," this sublimely 
picturesque defender of Christianity, this 
singular advocate of Democracy and Law, 
became at the dawn of the twentieth century, 
prey to a legion of enemies, more insidious 
and menacing than ever she had known in 
the whole tragic course of her tumultuous 
history. Never, not even in the days of 
Tamerlane and Genghis Khan, had she faced 
a situation so dire. Virtually, in the interests 
of the great Imperialisms, the race had been 
devoted to Death in the open market of the 
world. 

Of course, the Armenians themselves were 
unaware of the portentous drama which was 
being enacted behind the scenes. They could 



AFTER THE MASSACRES 87 

see clearly enough that their hopes of an 
European intervention had been chimerical, 
but they could not relinquish thought of 
an ultimate deliverance. At any rate, the 
present necessity was to help themselves, and 
in all their history there is nothing finer or 
more touching than the way in which this 
smitten and abandoned people, rallying from 
its wounds and wrongs, somehow or another 
recovered its morale and gradually resumed 
its old constructive place in the general life 
of Turkey and of the world. 

The massacres had cost the Armenians 
about a quarter of a million souls, and they 
had been followed by a new migration, 
necessarily limited, however, because of the 
Sultan's determination not to let his prey 
escape. Besides, there was an immense loss 
in wealth. Their homes had been destroyed 
and they had been robbed of their property. 
Some of the oldest business houses of Con- 
stantinople and elsewhere had been obliged 
to go out of business because of the impov- 
erishment of their Armenian creditors. There 
was a vast stream of orphans and defenceless 
old people to be cared for, homes and schools 



88 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

and orphanages to be built, and hospitals 
for the sick and wounded. But this was an 
undertaking in which warm-hearted foreign- 
ers, and especially Americans, shared. And 
presently out of the wreckage came clear 
evidence that the aspiring spirit of the people 
had been by no means extinguished. 

And there was need for courage and 
determination. For the Government had 
become more repressive than ever; more 
extortionate in its taxes, more severe in its 
penalties, more scandalously indifferent even 
to such justice as was the standard of the 
Turkish courts-of-law. The censorship, al- 
ready excessive, became ridiculous in its 
watchfulness. The Kurds and Circassians 
were still allowed to plunder the defenceless 
towns and villages at will. The prisons and 
dungeons were filled with Armenian victims. 
Spies were everywhere. 

To some races the alternative of submission 
might have suggested itself, but to the 
awakened Armenian spirit there appeared 
only the sacred necessity for further effort. 
Especially among the generous and enlight- 
ened youth trained in the universities of 



AFTER THB3 MASSACRES 89 

Europe and America, the feeling arose that 
did the people of Europe really know the 
character of the sufferings, and the nature 
and history of the afflicted race, they would 
not permit their governments to remain in- 
different to the pledges of elementary reform 
which had been made. 

An energetic diplomatic propaganda was 
therefore begun by them in London, Paris, 
Tiflis, Leipzig, Geneva, Alexandria, Boston, 
New York, and elsewhere, with the object 
of "converting" Europe, and of winning the 
active support of America. Again, as before, 
the object aimed at was not separation from 
Turkey, but reform. Journals were published 
in English, French, and Armenian, and books 
and articles were written and speeches made 
in which the nature of the issue was elaborated 
upon. The Armenian leaders of the patriotic 
societies made overtures, too, to the Young 
Turks, and offered to unite with them in 
demanding the restoration of the constitution 
which Odian had drawn up and which Abdul 
Hamid had proclaimed and then revoked. 
And, in sure token of the undying spiritual 
vitality of the race, there sprang into pas- 



90 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

sionate being a new literature, a new poetry, 
inspired chiefly by love of freedom and 
country, and more rich and powerful, more 
sustainediy and consciously artistic, perhaps, 
than any that had gone before. Aharonian, 
Siamento, Varoudjan, Toumanian, Tcho- 
banian, and others — the world will some day 
pay its tribute to their magnificent song.* 

The scope of this brief sketch does not 
permit individual tribute to the men of genius 
and faith who, at a period of history funda- 
mentally hostile to the rights of small peoples, 
dared unreservedly to devote all their gifts 
and resources to the furtherance of this holy 
but desperate cause. But Europe — now 
aligned, because of German aggression in 
the Near East, into two definite and mutually 
hostile camps, each contending for the control 
of Turkish territory — was in no position to 
interest herself in the internal reforms of 
that country. Therefore, in spite of toil and 
sacrifice and the co-operation of noble indi- 
viduals in England, France, America, and 
other countries, no definite progress was made. 
The appeal on behalf of Armenia became but 
a voice in the wilderness. 



AFTER THE MASSACRES 91 

Not in all countries, however, were the 
efforts of the Armenian patriots equally- 
abortive. By the opening years of the 
twentieth century, the struggle for national 
preservation in Russian Armenia had become 
acute, pursuant to the policy entered upon 
by Lobanoff at the time of the massacres. 
During these years the Government of the 
Czar attempted to bring the people into 
complete vassalage to a general scheme of 
Kussification. The plan was to destroy the 
national identity by depriving them of their 
language and of their Church, and to this 
end the schools were closed and the property 
and revenues of the ancient Mother Church 
at Etchmiadzin were confiscated. 

A singular method of terrorization was 
instituted by Christian Kussia — one which 
smacks of the policy which had been entered 
upon so shortly before by the government 
of the Kaiser. The religious fanaticism of 
the Moslem Tartars of the Caucasian region 
was secretly inflamed by the local Russian 
officials, and they were incited to war upon 
their Christian neighbors, with whom they 
had hitherto lived in peace. As a result, the 



92 THE TKAQEDY OF ARMENIA 

whole region was soon in the grip of a 
fanatical outburst. But the Amienians were 
well co-ordinated, and they possessed arms. 
Consequently they were able to defend 
themselves, and even to overcome the Tar- 
tar attacks. The dignified but determined 
passive resistance of the aged Catholicos 
Khrimian, too, had its effect. So the perse- 
cution fell into abeyance. 

A little later, we see the untiring spirit of 
the Armenians again at work in the cause 
of human freedom, this time in Persia. All 
who have followed the story of Persia's ill- 
starred but glorious attempt to take her 
place among the constitutionally governed 
nations, are doubtless familiar with the part 
played by the Armenian prince, Malcolm 
Khan, for some years Persian minister in 
London, who is said "to have sowed the first 
seeds of constitutional government in Persia" ; 
and with the name of the other Armenian 
leader, Ephrem Davidian, who later distin- 
guished himself in the same cause. But few, 
I believe, are aware of the heroic career 
which preceded Davidian's short-lived victory 
for Persia, and, consequently, for his country- 



AFTER THE MASSACRES 93 

men who had come under her domination. 
His brilHant but tragic story, so symbolic of 
the fortunes which have forever dogged the 
footsteps of his unfortunate nation, has been 
so admirably summarized by that remarkable 
woman of the same race, Mrs. Diana Agabeg 
Apcar, that it seems most fitting to let the 
tale be told in her own thrilling words. 

"In 1908," she writes, "Shah Muhammad 
Ali Mirza was deposed and constitutional 
government established in Persia. The 
cordiality between the Armenians and the 
Persians was great at that period, and 
the leader and generalissimo of the whole 
successful movement was Ephrem Davidian, 
known in Persia as Ephrem Khan. He 
escaped from Saghalien prison in 1891. 
Fighting with a score of companions against 
a whole Turkish regiment in Turkish 
Armenia, these young men when hard pressed 
crossed the frontier into Russian Armenia 
and were there immediately seized by the 
Russian authorities and consigned to a prison 
in Saghalien. Escaping, Ephrem became the 
leader of the nationalistic movement in Persia 
in 1908, and, as is well known, not only 



94 THE TEAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

defeated the ex-Shah's forces, but kept the 
peace of Teheran. Ephrem was idohzed 
by the Persian Constitutionahsts and when 
assassinated by the agents of the Russian 
government, was buried with royal honors by 
the Persian people." 

There seems to be little need of dwelling 
upon the so-called revolution which at this 
time occurred in Turkey, and which led to 
the dethronement of Abdul Hamid and the 
proclamation of a constitution. The word 
"revolution" in this connection is at best a 
misnomer. It was an affair in which the 
people had absolutely no part. It was simply 
the seizure of power by a military clique 
trained in Germany or by Germans, and 
although it gave to the Armenians a brief 
period of illusory hope,^ it does not deserve 
to be distinguished from the rule which pre- 
ceded it, except in so far as it has proved to 
be more scientifically cruel and destructive. 

The frightful massacre at Adana in which 
twenty thousand persons were slain within a 
few days, the very year following the procla- 
mation, shows only too emphatically, as some 



AFTER THE MASSACRES 95 

one has said, that the "Young" Turks were 
very like the "Old." And so it came about 
that in a Turkey possessed of a representative 
parliament, the Armenians, in order to obtain 
security for "life, honor, and property," were 
once more obliged to have formal recourse to 
the Powers which had signed the Treaty of 
Berlin. 

The explanation of this anomalous situation 
is not difficult to seek. There had been 
developing among the Young Turks and their 
followers a political credo, less ambitious, 
possibly, than the ancient pan-Islamic tide, 
but not less arrogant and ruthless; Turkey 
for the Turks was but a part of the pan- 
Turanian scheme which had come into being 
as a result of German stimulus and example. 
"In Parliament," says Viscount Bryce, "the 
program took such form as a bill to make 
the Turkish language the universal and 
compulsory medium of secondary education" 
— a death blow to Armenian progress andi 
nationality since "the vast majority of the 
secondary schools of the Empire were, of 
course, American, Armenian or Greek." But 
regardless of the fact that the Turkish Ian- 



96 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

guage was barren of a literature which would 
in any way meet the needs of the times, the 
Young Turks insisted upon this form of 
Ottomanization, and upon others equally 
impossible and reactionary. "And the Arme- 
nian deputies" — to quote Viscount Bryce 
again — "found themselves opposing it in con- 
cert with the liberal party, which included the 
Arab bloc and stood for the toleration of 
national individualities." In addition, the 
Armenians had positive demands to make, 
such as a mixed Gendarmarie — open to Turks 
and Armenians but closed to Kurds, who 
continued to practice their old habit of brig- 
andage — and for an actual, and not merely 
nominal, equality between Christians and 
Moslems before the law. 

But the Young Turks had become deaf to 
all reason. Intoxicated by the "superior race" 
idea, an altogether unfounded belief in their 
own abilities, based in part upon centuries of 
delusive racial privilege, had taken possession 
of them. And as affairs proceeded, and the 
actual administration of the Empire called 
more and more imperatively for men of prac- 
tical sense and ability, it maddened them to 



AFTER THE MASSACRES 97 

discover that the race whom they had always 
despised and outlawed was really the more 
capable of performing the work of the state, 
as well as of conducting the other affairs of 
life. 

The foundation for the jealousy which 
took possession of them is evident from the 
anaylses made by many European authorities, 
among them no less a personage than Dr. Paul 
Kohrbach, who, as an exponent of the Drang 
nach Osten program, spent four years in 
Turkey for the purpose of surveying the 
situation from every point of view. During 
this time he came to feel a very high and 
cordial admiration for the Armenians as a 
race, and it is evidently with a view of bring- 
ing them to the attention of the Home Gov- 
ernment as a valuable asset in the upbuilding 
of the future German Eastern Empire, that 
he dilates upon their abilities and virtues. 

According to Dr. Rohrbach (writing 
shortly before the outbreak of the war) the 
Armenians played a part in the intellectual 
and economic life of Turkey "entirely out 
of proportion to their number"; the Arme- 
nian schools supported by the voluntary 



ya THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

offerings of the people, and exclusive of 
all missionary establishments, exceeded the 
Tm^kish schools four to one, and were much 
better; the trades and the liberal professions 
were in Armenian hands, and, in general, 
the economic life of the Empire depended 
upon them, and this "^not because of a singular 
lack of business scruple^ or love of gain, but 
through their innate capacity for labor!" 

Dr. Rohrbach further states that their 
ability to read and write Turkish, in addition 
to their "general psychic energy and assiduity 
for labor," accounted for the relatively high 
number of Armenian employees in the service 
of the Turkish administration, without whom, 
he declares, "the machinery of the State would 
absolutely stop." And he adds that according 
to the testimony of the Constantinople 
press, the ministries of the two Armenians, 
Noradounghian and Haladjian — Internal 
Affairs and Public Works — were the only 
ones which had accomplished anything. 

But all this was beside the purpose, so far 
as the "Home Government" was concerned. 
Probably the plan to subdue or to wreck the 
Armenian people had been abeady provi- 



AFTER THE MASSACRES 99 

sionally formulated by Constantinople and 
Berlin; and the two Inspectors- General 
commissioned in 1913 by Germany and Russia 
to investigate the Armenian grievances on 
behalf of the Signatory Powers were doubt- 
less merely a blind, at least so far as the 
former was concerned. If the East was to 
be converted into a new type of despotism 
and the way made safe for a new tyranny, 
it was certainly not the Armenians who would 
play the leading and compliant part. At the 
suitable moment, all factors hostile to such a 
purpose must be eliminated, even though it 
meant the annihilation of an entii'e race. 

The shadow of the ultimate catastrophe 
was therefore already black upon the land 
when Germany gave the signal for the 
universal conflagration. 



Chapter VI 
IN THE WORLD WAK 

THE extreme precariousness of their 
position must have been sensed by the 
Armenians at the moment of the out- 
break of the war. Through the expostula- 
tions of their representatives in the Turkish 
parhament and elsewhere, their grievances 
against the Young Turk government and 
their distrust of this rule had become matters 
of official and popular knowledge. A war 
would give their enemy the opportunity to 
wreak vengeance upon them. The military 
entente between the Young Turks and Ger- 
many was already well known and Turkish 
participation on the German side was more 
than a probability. Turkish societies, called 
"patriotic," had recently sent threatening 
letters to the Armenian Patriarch, to the 
editors of the Armenian newspapers, to 
Boghos Nubar Pasha, President of the 
Armenian Delegation, and to others who 
were helping to bring the Armenian situation 



IN THE WORLD WAR 101 

before the attention of Europe. The follow- 
ing is one of many similar documents, signed 
by numbers of Turks, which these societies 
had sent to the Armenian press of Constanti- 
nople : 

"We advise you not to speak any more 
of Armenian reforms. If you do the matter 
will become serious and we will massacre you, 
old and young. We will eviscerate you in 
the open streets, and you will find the former 
massacres desirable in comparison to those 
which we shall execute."" 

At the same time, bands of Turkish 
"nationalists" had gone nightly through the 
streets of the Armenian quarter, marking in 
red and black insulting words and threats of 
death upon the doors of the Armenian houses, 
churches, and schools. Furthermore, just at 
this period the two Inspectors- General com- 
missioned by the Powers to examine into the 
Armenian situation had already arrived! 

But, aside from the actual peril of their 
position, there were moral reasons why the 
possibility of war between Turkey and the 
Entente should be painful and repugnant to 
the Armenians. By virtue of similarity of 



102 THE TRAGEDY OF AEMENIA 

character and ideals they had always been 
drawn to the people of France and England, 
and to the people of Kussia they were united 
not only by a certain understanding and 
sj^mpathy, but, in tlie Caucasus, by the tie 
of blood. To fight Russia would be to help 
in the slaughter of their own brothers. 
Hitherto, in all the Turco-European wars 
except the Balkan War of 1912, in which 
as citizens of constitutionally governed 
Turkey they had been obliged to participate, 
they had been spared the necessity of taking 
the field on the side of their deadly enemy 
because of their proscription as Christians 
from the Turkish military service. But now, 
if the constitution were lived up to, they 
would, in the event of war, be obliged to take 
up arms in defence of the despotic Young 
Turks and the Central Powers, and on behalf 
of principles which they had always abhorred. 
What had they been consistently throughout 
their history but a lance never in rest, a pil- 
grim always on the road, a martyr forever 
at the stake in the cause of political and 
religious democracy? A sardonic reminder of 
theii' known allegiance to these things ap- 



IN THE WOELD WAR 103 

peared in the Constantinople comic paper, 
"Karagoz" in the early days of the war." It 
depicted two Turks in earnest discussion. 
"Where do you get your war news?" asked 
one. "I do not need war news," replied the 
other. "I can follow the faces of the Arme- 
nians I meet. When they are happy I know 
the Allies are winning, and when they are 
depressed I know that the Germans have had 
a victory." 

Just as there is no equivalent for the word 
"compromise" in all their rich language, so 
there had been no room for it in the course 
of their hazardous national existence. It 
was too late for them to adopt a renegade 
policy. At best the officials and the men of 
military age could but perform their duties 
grimly and without show of enthusiasm, 
hoping against hope that they might thereby 
purchase immunity for the civilian popula- 
tion from the D jihad, or the massacre, which 
a general disturbance in Turkey was likely 
to portend, and of which there were already 
threatening rumors. 

As Turkish sympathy for the Central 
Powers grew more and more apparent, it 



104 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

became the one aim of the Armenian leaders 
to dissuade the Government from joining 
forces with these nations. As members of the 
Turkish parhament and as Ottoman citizens 
they tried to make it clear that such a course 
would be fatal to the life of the Empire. 
In this opinion some of the Turks of the 
Conservative party are said to have concurred. 
But when the Young Turks showed no 
inclination to heed the advice, some of the 
deputies of the interior provinces and other 
Armenian leaders decided to meet in confer- 
ence at Van and Erzeroum for the purpose 
of determining what course, in the event of 
war, would best safeguard the Armenian 
population. 

It is vitally important for us to realize 
that the question of winning the Armenians 
to the side of the Central Powers had already 
been uppermost in the minds of the Young 
Turks; and that at a time when so much 
hinged upon the attitude which this or that 
people would take, when other nationalities 
were bargaining back and forth for terms 
with both of the great contestants, the Arme- 
nians of Turkey, too, had at least an ostensible 



IN THE WOBLD WAR 105 

chance to barter their honor for their lives. 
There is every reason to believe that their 
ultimate destruction had been determined 
upon from the outset. (See "Documents 
presented to Viscount Grey" by Viscount 
Bryce — English Blue Book.) But the Young 
Turks, intriguers as well as murderers, pre- 
ferred, if possible, first to utilize their prey 
for their own disgraceful ends. The story of 
this attempt and its failure of accomplishment 
reflects the sheer heroism of the Armenian 
people and is one of the noblest episodes in 
the annals of the war. 

The scene occurred simultaneously in the 
cities already referred to. Van and Erzeroum, 
— Van, originally founded by S emir amis as 
a summer city, later the capital of a long line 
of Armenian kings; a city overlooking the 
great salt lake of Van, five thousand feet 
above sea level; a beautiful city made more 
beautiful by the industry of her inhabitants; 
a city of orchards, vineyards, and gardens; 
and Erzeroum, situated at an even higher 
altitude and, like Van, in the center of that 
part of ancient Armenia to the soil of which 
the race had clung with the greatest tenacity. 



106 THE TEAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

It was to these classic Armenian strongholds 
that the Enver-Talaat government sent their 
representatives for the purpose of inducing 
the Armenian leaders, assembled there in 
convention, to incite their brethren across the 
Russian frontier to take up arms on the side 
of Turkey. 

The story comes to us through many chan- 
nels, but I quote it as given in Document 21 
in the English Blue Book already referred to: 

According to the project of the Young Turks, the 
Armenians were to pledge themselves to form legions 
of volunteers and to send them to the Caucasus with 
the Turkish propagandists, to prepare the way there 
for the insurrection. 

The Young Turk representatives had already brought 
their propagandists with them to Erzeroum — 27 indi- 
viduals of Persian, Turkish, Lesghian and Circassian 
nationality. The Turks tried to persuade the Arme- 
nians that a Caucasian insurrection was inevitable; 
that very shortly the Tartars, Georgians and moun- 
taineers would revolt, and that the Armenians would 
consequently be obliged to follow them. 

They even sketched the future map of the Caucasus. 

The Turks offered to the Georgians the provinces of 
Koutais, and of Tiflis, the Batoum district and a part 
of the province of Trebizond; to the Tartars, Shousha, 
the mountain country as far as Vladivkavkaz, Bakon, 



IN THE WORLD WAR 107 

and a part of the province of Elisavetpol; to the 
Armenians they offered Kars, the province of Erivan, 
a part of Elisavetpol^ a fragment of the province of 
Erzeroum, Van and Bitlis. According to the Young 
Turk scheme^ all these groups were to become autono- 
mous under a Turkish protectorate. The Erzeroum 
Congress refused these proposals, and advised the 
Young Turks not to hurl themselves into the European 
conflagration. 

The Young Turks were irritated by this advice. 

"This is treason!" cried Boukhar-ed-Din-Shakir, one 
of the delegates from Constantinople: "You take sides 
with Russia in a moment as critical as this ; you refuse 
to defend the Government; you forget that you are 
enjoying its hospitality!" 

But the Armenians held to their decision. 

Once more before the outbreak of war between 
Russia and Turkey, the Young Turks tried to obtain 
the Armenians' support. This time they opened their 
pourparlers with more moderate proposals, and 
negotiated with the Armenian representatives of each 
Vilayet. At Van, the pourparlers were conducted by 
the provincial governor Tahsin Bey, and by Nadji 
Bey; at Moush, by Servet Bey and Iskhan Bey; at 
Erzeroum by the same Tahsin Bey and by others. 

The project of an Armenian rising in the Caucasus 
was abandoned. Instead, the Ottoman Armenians were 
to unite themselves with the Transcaucasian Tartars, 
whose insurrection was, according to the Young Turks, 
a certainty. 



108 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

Once more the Armenians refused. 

From the moment the war broke out, the Armenian 
soldiers had presented themselves for service at their 
regimental depots, but they refused categorically to 
form irregular bands. 

In case of war between Turkey and Russia, they 
said, the Armenians on both sides of the frontier must 
do their duty by their respective governments. 

Meanwhile another sinister drama was being 
enacted on the other side of the Kussian 
frontier. When Kussia learned that the Turks 
were mobilizing, she sent representatives to 
address the Armenians of the Caucasus and 
to promise them that if they would help 
her to the utmost she would guarantee future 
autonomy to the Armenians of Turkey. 
Word, too, is said to have come to them — 
unofficially, I believe, — from the other Powers 
of the Entente telling them that if they would 
do all in their power to hold the Turk at bay 
on the Eastern front all help would be forth- 
coming from France and England. The race 
in whose defence not one single shot had ever 
been fired had suddenly become, because of 
their strategic position, a determining factor 
in that critical region — one of the gateways 



IN THE WORLD WAR 109 

to India. And they were being leaned upon 
by a world which had abandoned them in their 
long struggle! 

The Armenians of the Caucasus knew very 
well that the designs of Russia were funda- 
mentally unfriendly to them, but they recog- 
nized the world aspect of the struggle, and 
readily agreed to organize volunteer corps to 
help the regular army, and a committee was 
formed at Tiflis to recruit them. But the 
Armenian regular soldiers, to the number of 
160,000, and the 20,000 volunteers who almost 
immediately responded to the call, showed 
such eagerness for action that Russia became 
alarmed. A brilliant Armenian defence on 
the home soil might lead to national ambition 
and future complications. So, to the con- 
sternation of the Armenian community, most 
of the regulars were transferred to the Poland 
and Galician fronts, and old Russian reservists 
who knew nothing of this tangled mountain 
region were sent to guard the lines. More- 
over, Russia equipped but grudgingly the 
Armenian volunteers and instead of sending 
them as a compact uiiit, arranged to have them 
scattered over the front. 



110 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

The Armenians saw that Russia was not 
really with them. The High Command not 
only did all in its power to make the situa- 
tion difficult for the soldiers: it behaved in a 
very unkind and unscrupulous way to the 
Armenian civilian population. Still the Arme- 
nians tried to keep their spirits. The volun- 
teers were popular with the Russian rank 
and file and, eager to have part in a war 
waged against their most cruel foe, they 
overlooked the unsatisfactory stand of the 
Russian government. 

While these events were progressing in 
Russia, the Young Turks, infuriated by the 
refusal of the Armenians of Turkey to 
acquiesce in their nefarious and much counted- 
upon Caucasian scheme, were putting the 
loyalty of these their fellow citizens to the 
severest tests by "requisitioning" their prop- 
erty in a wholly wanton and ominous way, 
and by sending battalions formed exclusively 
of Armenians to the most exposed fronts, 
there to be mown down by French and British 
shells. Naturally these outrages filled the 
Armenians with intense indignation, but in 
general they restrained themselves, and care- 



IN THE WORLD WAR 111 

fully refrained from any act of even seeming 
disloyalty, in order to give no pretext for 
fm'ther reprisals. 

But there was no avoiding the end that had 
been prepared for them. It had been too long 
an obsession of the Turkish mind. And now 
that it was clear both to the Turks and to 
their German accomplices that the Armenians 
would never consent to become the tools of 
Turco- German design, there was every reason, 
to their mind, why it should be immediately 
accomplished. For the first time in years 
they felt themselves wholly free of the re- 
straint which the attitude of Europe had 
hitherto to some extent imposed upon them. 
More than that, they enjoyed the full pro- 
tection of a Power whose philosophy coincided 
exactly with their own and whom they be- 
lieved to be invincible. The war hung like a 
curtain of fire between them and the outside 
world. In the chaos of the moment they could 
work out their intentions wholly unchecked 
and without fear of punishment. 

But unlike the days of Abdul Hamid, 
some of the Armenians were now armed, and 
unless they could be rendered defenceless the 



112 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

struggle would take on the character not of 
massacre but of civil war, an eventuality by 
all means to be avoided. 

As a preliminary step, therefore, they 
decided to murder the Armenian soldiery 
throughout the country simultaneously and 
en masse, after forming them into "labor 
battalions"; and at the same time to decoy 
and murder the prominent Armenian leaders. 
Then they would fall on the civilian popula- 
tion, and as Talaat Bey expressed it, "put an 
end to the Armenian question for the next 
fifty years." It was a piece of perfectly regu- 
lar Turco-Prussian strategy. 

In less than a year the deed has been ac- 
complished. The Armenians of Turkey to 
the number of about a million, old and young, 
rich and poor, and of both sexes, had been 
collectively drowned, burned, bayonetted, 
starved, bastinadoed, or otherwise tortured to 
death, or else deported on foot, penniless, and 
without food, to the burning Arabian deserts. 

How shall we name the dastardly crime 
which robbed them of life and homeland? 
Plow shall we describe that catastrophe, the 



IN THE WORLD WAR 113 

detailed accounts of which, as Mr. A. P. 
Hacobian, of London, in his book "Armenia 
and the War," so fitly says, "unfolds to the 
horrified gaze of mankind a vast column of 
human smoke and anguish rising to the 
heavens as the incense of the most fearful yet 
most glorious mass-martyrdom the world has 
ever seen"? To attempt to do so — is it not 
almost an irreverence to the august dead? 
We of the powerful West, who might long 
ago have averted all this agony and appalling 
waste of precious human resource, had we 
been, honorable enough to fulfill even the 
most elementary obligations of our great 
religion — what is there for us to say by way 
of sympathetic tribute in the presence of this 
sublime agony, this breaking of a nation's 
body, this rending of a nation's soul? 

It is for us to remember that they went to 
their death, man, woman, and child, not only 
as martyrs to the sacred ideal for which their 
fathers had made immemorial sacrifices; not 
only as victims of hideous despotism and base 
political intrigue; but also virtually as noble 
prisoners of war in the interest of our cause 
which, in spite of threatening pressure, they 



114 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

had resolutely refused to betray. A poig- 
nantly magnanimous climax to a singularly 
unbefriended national career! Yet, although 
until "the future dares forget the Past, their 
fate and fame shall be an echo and a light unto 
eternity," how would the great heart of man- 
kind wish that in the midst of the flames which 
were destroying our temporizing and mate- 
rialistic civilization, these, the wholly innocent,, 
might somehow have been spared ! 

But, no, amid the smoke and glare of the 
universal conflagration, the tragedy plunges 
forward, and a scene from which we shrink 
forces itself upon our eyes. Those cordons 
of men and boys bound together and hurled 
from precipices or thrown into the sea, or 
bayonetted, still warm and sometimes still 
breathing, into great trench graves which they 
themselves had dug, or felled by the axe, each 
in his turn, as they wait, herded in lonely 
valley, or in prison yard, or rained upon by 
the fire of great guns as they stand awaiting 
"orders," or listening to the reading of some 
spurious proclamation; those women "praying 
in the flames," or lying in their own and their 
children's blood upon the hearthstones or by 



IN THE WORLD WAR 115 

the roadside; the unending procession of the 
deported who, uprooted from their ancestral 
home, dragged from the beautiful springtime 
of the Armenian highlands, are driven forth 
to the scorching deserts, there to die of 
hunger, heat and drought; the mothers dying 
in childbirth upon the road, or begging the 
casual passer-by to take from them their 
adored and lovely babies and being refused 
even that tragic boon; those mothers who, 
unable to carry their children, or to endure 
the sight of their suffering, await with both 
eagerness and dread the sight of lake or river 
into which they may cast them as a final 
act of mercy; those children crying for their 
murdered parents, for their lost brothers and 
sisters, as they too march forward to their 
own deaths; the maidens weeping for their 
lost lovers or struggling with the demons 
who drag them off to slavery; all while Turk- 
ish and German officers look brutally on, 
and give orders to the' convicts — recruited 
from the prisons for this murderous purpose 
— who herd the procession ever forward be- 
neath the blows of their heavy goads: these 
are but the blurred outlines of that immense 



116 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

hecatomb to the gods of Lust and Blood 
which dominated the land. 

But the dead will not permit us to remain 
with them. There are other heroes who com- 
mand our homage. In the midst of the 
universal carnage, the civilian population of 
certain towns and villages, raised to a pitch 
of superhuman courage by the knowledge of 
what threatened both them and their nation, 
waged a defensive warfare which, considering 
all the circumstances, may justly be regarded 
as absolutely unmatched. In most cases, after 
these stubborn resistances had failed for want 
of ammunition, the inhabitants were burned 
in their churches, or in wooden concentration 
camps erected for the purpose, put to the 
sword or tortured to death ; but in the districts 
bordering the Russian frontier they sometimes 
managed to escape by throwing in their lot 
with the Husso- Armenian volunteers and the 
regular Russian army, retreating or advanc- 
ing with these as Fortune dictated. 

These defenses, although part of the chain 
which united those of Belgium, France, Italy, 
and Serbia, were conducted under circum- 



IN THE WOKLD WAK 117 

stances which recall Thermopylae, and the 
famous sieges of antiquity. They are destined 
to live forever in the immortal Hero-Book 
of our battle-scarred world. In the midst of 
a struggle carried on by means of submarines, 
gas bombs, air ships and tanks, these pictures 
of primitive warfare flash out upon us veri- 
tably as from the Classic Age. 

Although the records of the towns and 
villages of each vilayet shine with deeds of 
individual and community valor, in certain 
spots, like Van, Sassoun, and Djibal-Moussa, 
Armenian heroism was illustrated in more 
commanding if not in more intensified form. 

The wonderful story of Djibal-Moussa, a 
town of Cilician Armenia overlooking the 
Mediterranean, is bound to become a classic, 
both because of its gallant and picturesque 
quality, and because of the thrilling rescue 
of the beleagured mountaineers by the God- 
sent French flagship, Ste. Jeanne d'Arct 

The resistance of Sassoun, too, although 
fatal in its ending, will forever enhearten 
the souls of valiant men. Let me quote the 
story as it comes to us in Document 22 of 
the English Blue Book: 



118 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

While the "Butcher" battalions of Djevdet Bey and 
the regulars of Kiazim Bey were engaged in Bitlis 
and Moush, some cavalry were sent to Sassoun early in 
July to encourage the Kurds who had been defeated 
by the Armenians at the beginning of June. The 
Turkish cavalry invaded the lower valley of Sassoun 
and captured a few villages after stout fighting. In 
the meantime the reorganized Kurdish tribes attem-pted 
to close on Sassoun from the South, West, and North. 
During the last fortnight of July almost incessant fight- 
ing went on, sometimes even during the night. On the 
whole, the Armenians held their own on all fronts and 
expelled the Kurds from their advanced positions. 
However, the people of Sassoun had other anxieties to 
worry about. The population had doubled since their 
brothers who had escaped from the plains had sought 
refuge in their mountains; the millet crop of the last 
season had been a failure; all honey, fruit, and other 
local produce had been consumed, and the people had 
been feeding on unsalted roast mutton (they had not 
even any salt to make the mutton more sustaining) ; 
finally, the ammunition was in no way sufficient for the 
requirements of heavy fighting. But the worst had yet 
to come. Kiazim Bey, after reducing the town and 
the plain of Moush, rushed his army to Sassoun for a 
new effort to overwhelm these brave mountaineers. 
Fighting was renewed on all fronts throughout the 
Sassoun district. Big guns made carnage among the 
Armenian ranks. Roupen tells me that Gorioun, 
Dikran, and twenty others of their best fighters were 



IN THE WORLD WAR 119 

killed by a single shell, which burst in their midst. 
Encouraged by the presence of guns, the cavalry and 
Kurds pushed on with relentless energy. 

The Armenians were compelled to abandon the out- 
lying lines of their defence and were retreating day 
by day into the heights of Antok, the central block of 
the mountains, some 10,000 feet high. The non-com- 
batant women and children and their large flocks of 
cattle greatly hampered the free movements of the 
defenders, whose number had already been reduced 
from 3,000 to about half that figure. Terrible con- 
fusion prevailed during the Turkish attacks as well 
as the Armenian counter attacks. Many of the Arme- 
nians smashed their rifles after firing the last car- 
tridge and grasped their revolvers and daggers. The 
Turkish regulars and Kurds, amounting now to some- 
thing like 30,000 altogether, pushed higher and higher 
up the heights and surrounded the main Armenian 
position at close quarters. Then followed one of those 
desperate and heroic struggles for life which have 
always been the pride of mountaineers. Men, women, 
and children fought with knives, scythes, stones, and 
anything else they could handle. They rolled blocks 
of stone down the steep slopes, killing many of the 
enemy. In a frightful hand-to-hand combat, women 
were seen thrusting their knives into the throats of 
Turks and thus accounting for many of them. On the 
5th of August, the last day of the fighting, the blood- 
stained rocks of Antok were captured by the Turks. 
The Armenian warriors of Sassoun, except those who 



120 THE TRAGEDY OF AEMENIA 

had worked round to the rear of the Turks to attack 
them on their flanks, had died in battle." 



There is a wealth of material concerning 
Van, which the Armenians held for four 
weeks against a German-led Turkish army. 
To defend themselves, the civilians were 
obliged to manufacture their own powder, to 
construct their own mortars, and even to 
make their own guns. We learn that they 
succeeded in making from two to four thou- 
sand cartridges a day, that "the blacksmiths 
made spears to be used if necessary when the 
ammunition was all gone"; that they dug 
trenches and underground passages through 
which they blew up Turkish barracks and 
entrenchments; and that in the very midst 
of the most furious bombardments, the 
Normal School band played Armenian 
national airs and the Marseillaise to enhearten 
the fighters! 

"All the people of Van, without excep- 
tion," says an eye-witness, "worked with one 
soul. Those who had arms and were able to 
fight rushed to take their stand and stop the 
Turks from entering the Armenian quarters, 



IN THE WORLD WAR 121 

and those who were able to work took spade 
and shovel to go to strengthen the fighting 
men's positions by constructing trenches and 
walls. The little boys worked as scouts, the 
women and girls undertook the care of the 
sick and of the children and did all the cook- 
ing and sewing for the fighters. 

"To save their lives and honor all the 
Armenians of Van had placed their services 
at the disposal of the Military Council, who 
awarded crosses and medals to encourage 
those who were worthy of them. I was pres- 
ent when a little girl received one of these 
medals. During the retaking of a position 
in Angous Tzor she bravely went ahead, 
spied out the ground and brought back news 
that the Turks had laid no traps for the 
advancing Armenian soldiers." 

The actual fighting force of Van numbered 
only 1500 men, but by their skill and strategy, 
no less than by their valor, and with the de- 
voted backing of the other inhabitants, they 
forced the enemy finally to evacuate their 
positions. "At midnight, on the 17th of May, 
1915," says the same eye-witness, "the town 
criers went through the town crying 'Victory.' 



122 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

. . . The whole city was in an uproar; some 
went to look at the entrenchments: others to 
look at the burned Turkish quarters; and 
ethers to visit the fortress, captured that 
night, and over which a banner waved, 
bearing the symbol of the Cross. 

"Shortly after, news came that the Russian 
army with the Armenian Volunteers was in 
sight. The joy of the people was boundless; 
tears of gladness and of emotion for what 
they had suffered during the past month 
rolled down their cheeks as they made them 
welcome." They fired salvos from the cap- 
tured Turkish guns and "laid the keys of 
the captured city and Castle at the feet of the 
Russian General." 

But to the eternal infamy of the Czar's 
government, the heroic resistance of the 
Van and other Armenians of the region, 
as well as the valiant efforts of the Russo- 
Armenian volunteers, was partially undone 
by the mysterious conduct of the Russian 
army. The prospect of an eventual occupa- 
tion by Russia of the Armenian plateau, as 
arranged by a secret treaty between her and 



IN THE WORLD WAR 123 

the other Powers of the Entente — later 
published by the Bolsheviki — was evidently 
dictating a policy hostile to them. An un- 
accountable retreat was almost immediately 
ordered, which exposed the now defenseless 
population either to all the ravages of a forced 
march over the frontier or to the mercy of the 
oncoming Turks. The obvious design was to 
accomplish the depopulation of the country, 
and thus to prepare the way for the Russian 
colonization, which even now was beginning 
to take form in the bands of Kussian Cossack 
peasants who were actually pre-empting 
Armenian lands.^^ 

This shameless and terrible policy was 
crushing to the spirits of the Armenians of 
Russia, as well as to the already agonized 
hearts of those still on Turkish soil. But 
surrender was impossible, and they persisted 
in their desperate struggle against the Turco- 
German program. The fall of the Czar's 
government, which in the natural order of 
things would have been to them a blessing, 
only aggravated and intensified their imme- 
diate peril. They had been deprived of the 
bulk of their own fighting men at the be- 



124 THE TRAGEDY OP ARMENIA 

ginning of the war, it will be remembered, 
by transfer to the Western front, and when the 
Russian regulars were withdrawn, they were 
thrown entirely upon their own meager 
resources. The only recourse was to organize 
what resistance they could, in conjunction 
with the Georgians. 

So early as May, 1917, anticipating this 
general demoralization of the Russian army, 
the Armenians had sent representatives 
to Petrograd to urge upon the Kerensky 
government the speedy return of the Armenian 
regulars for the defense of the Caucasian 
front. But the government could do little 
for them. The delegates therefore formed in 
Petrograd a committee of Armenian military 
men for the purpose of finding ways and 
means of effecting this end. With all their 
efforts, however, they succeeded, in six 
months, in transferring only 35,000 men. 
These were joined with volunteers and formed 
into army corps. 

To add to the terrors of the situation, the 
Tartars rose in open league with the Turks 
and were burning bridges, cutting railroad 
communications, and attacking the Armenians 



IN THE WOKLD WAR 125 

from all sides. This was an enormous handi- 
cap, but the Armenians none the less suc- 
ceeded in fighting their way through and 
holding the front against the advancing Turk- 
ish army. 

Then came the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, by 
the stipulations of which part of Kussian 
Armenia was ceded to the Turks! This the 
Armenians had the daring utterly to repu- 
diate, and for a time, with the co-operation of 
the Georgians, they continued to resist the 
Turkish assault. Then the Georgians capit- 
ulated, and the Armenians went on with the 
struggle single-handed, conducting them- 
selves so valiantly that as late as July 14, 
1918, Mr. Balfour was able to say in the 
British Parliament: "We follow with the 
deepest sympathy and admiration the brave 
resistance which the Armenians are offering 
to the Turkish army." And although the 
Armenians of the Erivan district were, in 
the language of Lord Robert Cecil of the 
British Foreign Office, "at length compelled 
by main force to suspend hostilities" and come 
to terms with the foe, other Armenians of the 
Caucasus, under the leadership of Generals 



126 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

Andranik, Nazarbekof, Pakradooni, and 
Rostome, are continuing the fight to the 
present hour. 

And of the Armenians of Erivan, Lord 
Robert says: "Great Britain and her allies 
understand the cruel necessity which forced 
them to take that step, and look forward to 
the time, perhaps not far distant, when the 
allied victories may reverse their undeserved 
misfortunes"; and he acknowledges their 
services at length, saying, among other things, 
"that they had thrown themselves into the 
breach which the Russian breakdown left open 
in Asia by taking over the Caucasian front, 
and for five months delaying the Turks' 
advance, — and that they thus rendered im- 
portant service to the British army in 
Mesopotamia'' 

While these sublime actors were playing 
this immensely significant part, unsustained 
by the help or fellowship of their European 
comrades at arms, and scarcely knowing what 
the Fates, even in the event of victory, would 
have in store for them, but resting ever on 
their abiding faith in Ultimate Justice, other 
Armenians, of the Dispersion, were fighting 



IN THE WORLD WAR 127 

with the Allied forces in the Foreign Legion 
of France, with the EngHsh in Palestine and 
Mesopotamia, and ia the United States army. 
And the civilian Armenians, men and women, 
were doing all in their power, as doctors, 
nurses, engineers, Red Cross, and Liberty 
Loan workers, to help on the general cause of 
human freedom. The welcome and encour- 
agement which these received from the Allied 
governments brought new life to their lacer- 
ated but undying hope of an emancipated 
Armenia — a hope which became assurance 
when America, taking the sword, announced 
for all mankind the new international 
Apocalypse : 

"but the eight is more precious than 
peacej and we shall fight for the things 
which we have always carried nearest 

our hearts for democracy^ for the right 

of those who submit to authority to have 
a voice in their own government, for the 
rights and liberties of small nations^ for 
a universal dominion of right by such a 
concert of free peoples as shall bring 
peace and safety to all nations and make 
the world itself at last free." 




Chapter VII 

IN THE WORLD COURT 

HEN Tamerlane arrived before 
Sivas," we are told, "the pearl of 
Armenia, thousands of children met 
him with garlands of roses. He had both the 
children and the roses crushed under the hoofs 
of his horses." And on the neighboring plain, 
—called to this day "The Black Field,"— he 
erected one of his huge pyramids of skulls. 
This was in the fourteenth century. 

In 1915, the descendants of Tamerlane, in 
union with the Government of Germany, were 
responsible for crimes throughout the length 
and breadth of the Turkish Empire, before the 
magnitude, the cruel finesse, the "cold com- 
manded lust" of which even the horrors of 
their ancient prototype pale. Of this the 
testimony of Signor Gorrini, Italian Consul- 
General at Trebizond, published in the journal 
"II Messaggero" of Rome, August 25, 1915, 
and republished in the English Blue Book, 



IN THE^WOKLD^COITRT 129 

concerning the fate of the Armenians of 
Trebizond alone would serve as ample proof :^^ 

"It was a real extermination and slaughter of the 
innocents," he says, "an unheard-of thing, a black page 
stained with the flagrant violation of the most sacred 
rights of humanity, of Christianity, of nationality. 
The Armenian Catholics, too, who in the past had 
always been respected and excepted from the massacres 
and persecutions, were this time treated worse than 
any — again by the orders of the Central Government. 
There were about 14,000 Armenians at Trebizond — 
Gregorians, Catholics, and Protestants. They had 
never caused disorders or given occasion for collective 
measures of police. When I left Trebizond, not a 
hundred of them remained. 

"From the 24th of June, the date of the publication 
of the infamous decree, until the 23rd of July, the date 
of my own departure from Trebizond, I no longer slept 
or ate; I was given over to nerves and nausea, so 
terrible was the torment of having to look on at the 
wholesale execution of these defenceless, innocent 
creatures. 

"The passing of the gangs of Armenian exiles beneath 
the windows and before the door of the Consulate; their 
prayers for help, when neither I nor any other could 
do anything to answer them; the city in a state of siege, 
guarded at every point by 15,000 troops in complete war 
equipment, by thousands of police agents, by bands of 
volunteers and by the members of the 'Committee of 



130 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

Union and Progress'; the lamentations, the tears, the 
abandonments, the imprecations, the many suicides, 
the instantaneous deaths from sheer terror, the sudden 
unhinging of men's reason, the conflagrations, the 
shooting of victims in the city, the ruthless searches 
through the houses and in the countryside ; the hundreds 
of corpses found every day along the exile road; the 
young veomen converted by force to Islam or exiled 
like the rest; the children torn away from their families 
or from the Christian schools, and handed over by force 
to Moslem families, or else placed by hundreds on board 
ship in nothing but their shirts, and then capsized and 
drowned in the Black Sea and the River Deyirmen Dere 
— these are my last ineffaceable memories of Trebizond, 
memories which still, at a month's distance, torment 
my soul and almost drive me frantic. When one has 
had to look on for a whole month at such horrors, at 
such protracted tortures, with absolutely no power of 
acting as one longed to act, the question naturally and 
spontaneously suggests itself, whether all the cannibals 
and all the wild beasts in the world have not left their 
hiding places and retreats, left the virgin forests of 
Africa, Asia, America, and Oceanica, to make their 
rendezvous at Stamboul. I should prefer to close our 
interview at this point, with the solemn asseveration 
that this black page in Turkey's history calls for the 
most uncompromising reproach and for the vengeance 
of all Christendom. If they knew all the things that 
I know, all that I have had to see with my eyes and 
hear with my ears, all Christian powers that are still 



IN THE WORLD COURT 131 

neutral would be impelled to rise up against Turkey 
and cry anathema against her inhuman Government and 
her ferocious 'Committee of Union and Progress/ 
and they would extend the responsibility to Turkey's 
Allies, who tolerate or even shield with their strong 
arm these execrable crimes, which have not their equal 
in history, either modern or ancient. Shame, horror 
and disgrace!" 

For almost six centuries Armenia has been 
compelled to sacrifice her children and her 
roses — her flesh and blood, her cultm^e, and 
the fruits of her toil — to an insatiable Moloch 
of savagery and greed, and to the later years 
of this ordeal by blood and fire the great 
outside world has remained, we must repeat, 
a passive spectator. One of these mass- 
sacrifices was exacted, as we know, so short 
a time before the war as the year 1909, when 
20,000 persons were massacred at Adana and 
in its environs. But not a movement was 
made to arrest the holocaust. Other gods, in 
addition to those of Turkey, required then 
their blood oblations. Now, however, the 
vengeance which follows violated moral law 
has finally overtaken all the world and, in the 
vision born of agony and remorse, the world 



132 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

will now make to Armenia what amends it 
can. 

And what are these amends? In a word, 
they are the restoration to the Armenian 
people of their ancient fatherland where, in 
the free exercise of their genius and devotion, 
they may have the opportunity of building a 
state which shall be worthy of the sacrifices 
they have immemorially made for the sake of 
religion, nationality, progress and freedom. 
We cannot give them back their dead. But 
we can and must make this belated act of 
reparation. It is America's and the Allies' 
sacred promise that justice shall at length be 
done to the small nationalities. And to what 
people does the world owe more than to this, 
which veritably has been sacrificed for the 
sins of the world? 

The solution commends itself even on other 
grounds than the all-sufficing one of justice. 
If not to the Armenians, to whom should we 
grant their ancient patrimony? What other 
race installed in this region, on the borderland 
of East and West, would serve world needs 
so well as they, — they who have been re- 
peatedly called the "natural intermediaries 



IN THE WORLD COURT 133 

between Orient and Occident"; they whose 
administrative ability has already been so 
amply demonstrated in the number of states- 
men they have given to the world, and whose 
industrial and commercial abilities, whose 
sobriety and perseverance, are matters of 
common knowledge. Even in modern days, 
have they not filled high administrative posts 
in the service of the British Empire, of Russia, 
Turkey, and Persia? It is acknowledged that 
England's success in governing Egypt is 
largely traceable to the genius of Nubar 
Pasha who, both because of his personal gifts 
and his Armenian origin, was able sympa- 
thetically to interpret the needs of both East 
and West, and to whom, upon his death, the 
Mohammedans and Christians of Egypt 
united to erect a monument. As ministers of 
public instruction, as prime ministers, as 
ambassadors and as all kinds of lesser officials, 
they have figured successfully in the political 
life of all these countries. And as for the 
question of national defence, what race is 
better able to defend order than this which 
has proved itself the bravest of the brave and 
which, under Russia, has never been without 



134 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

its distinguished warriors, from the days of 
the general, Prince Pagratian, who was "the 
opponent of Napoleon in 1812," down to 
those of General Samsonoff who died on the 
Poland front in the present war "trying to 
relieve the strain on Paris," and General 
Andranik and his colleagues, last in the 
defence of the Caucasian front. The fact 
that the Turks, by resorting to the device 
of keeping them unarmed throughout the 
centuries, were able to murder them at will 
is merely a proof of Turkish cowardice. 
Whenever they were known to possess arms 
they were generally avoided by both Turks 
and Kurds. In the Caucasus, Hussia has 
depended very largely upon them in the main- 
tenance of order. It was they who conr 
stituted, to a great extent, the gendarmerie. 

Moreover, if not in a free Armenia, where 
then shall we place this race? It is not to be 
thought for a moment that we shall expect 
them to live again under some Turkish 
hegemony. To expect them to submit to the 
authority of the would-be annihilators of their 
nation would be to do a fundamental violence 
to the moral nature of all mankind. It would 



IN THE WORLD COURT 135 

signify a return to that hideous pre-war 
morality, in which fair was so often foul and 
foul was so often fair. Even before the con- 
clusion of hostilities the world has fully made 
up its mind upon this point. The merits and 
claims both of the Armenians and of the 
Turks it has already clearly defined. The ver- 
dict of Mr. WiUiam T. Stead that the Turk 
is but "a barbarian encamped upon the 
ashes of the civilizations which he destroyed," 
is only one echo from the chorus of classic 
and contemporary British and Latin opinion, 
while Heinrich von Treitschke's view may 
suggest even to defeated Germany the un- 
desirability of further alliance with, or 
support of, this monstrous and anachronistic 
rule. "A near future," he writes, "will, it is 
to be hoped, blot out the scandal that such 
heathendom should ever have established itself 
on European soil. What has this Turkish 
Empire done in three entire centuries? It 
has done nothing but destroy." 

For an American judgment with regard 
to Turkey's past and future, we may turn to 
the words of Mr. Henry Morgenthau, recent 
American ambassador to Constantinople, who 



136 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

was witness to the evil power of the Turk as 
it displayed itself in the terrible year of 1915. 

"After 450 years of misrule," Mr. Morgen- 
thau says, "the Turks at last are going to be 
deprived of their domination over the Chris- 
tian, Jewish, and Arabian population of 
Turkey. There must be no maudlin senti- 
ment or emotional sympathy about their 
treatment. They stand convicted of whole- 
sale murder in the first degree, of committing 
the most atrocious crimes and beastly tortures 
of the ages; of maintaining an unjust and 
incompetent government. 

"They have demonstrated their absolute 
inability to govern either themselves or the 
nations that they have conquered. 

"They have never assimilated the peoples 
whose territory they have overrun. 

"They have lived all these years as para- 
sites, maintaining their power by brute 
strength. 

"They have really given nothing to these 
countries, no architecture, no literature, no art, 
no progress of any kind. 

"They have sapped the life-blood and the 
energy of the occupants of these lands. 



IN THE WORLD COURT 137, 

"They have deprived the people of security 
of life and property, thereby taking away all 
incentives to any unusual energy or to the 
keeping in line with the progress of the time. 

"In fact they have cowed the people into 
a condition of rebellious though subdued sub- 
mission. They have ruled by might and fear 
and not by right and love. . . . They have 
deprived themselves of the best part of their 
population. They have robbed, pillaged and 
murdered as only the most conscienceless 
brood of barbarians could do." 

On the other hand there is the record of 
Armenia, a record, in the words of the 
French writer, M. Emile Pignot, of "an entire 
people bruised by the heaviest chains, lacerated 
by the most oppressive yoke, yet standing 
unbowed in the face of all sufferings, of all 
tyrannies, of all betrayal, of all infamies, 
erect upon all the Golgothas of torture, and 
proclaiming to the world the invincibility of 
its soul," — a race whose "leaders have fallen 
in order that from their closed eyes might 
shine more clearly, more luminously, and more 
imperishably, the light of their national 
genius"; a race described by M. Deschanel, 



138 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

President of the Chamber of Deputies and 
Member of the Academy, as having been able 
"even in the shadow of its slavery," to guard 
"the secret spring of letters, of the arts, and 
of liberty of conscience"; a race characterized 
by the Honorable Andrew D. White, former 
Ambassador to Germany and President of 
Cornell University, as "one of the finest 
races in the world, physically, morally and 
intellectually"; by Viscount Bryce as "of 
conspicuous brain power, with a capacity for 
intellectual and moral progress, as well as with 
a natural tenacity of will and purpose, beyond 
that of all their neighbors" ; and by Dr. James 
L. Barton, Secretary of the American Board 
of Foreign Missions and for eight years 
President of Euphrates College, as "religious, 
industrious and faithful, . . . not inferior in 
mental ability to any race on earth." 

If the future of Armenia were sure to be 
settled solely upon the shining merit of the 
Armenian cause, or by the universally approv- 
ing testimony of the eminent men and women 
of all races who have loved and defended it, 
this little nation would scarcely need to present 
its claims before the World Cmirt. But in 



IN THE WOKLD COURT 139 

that case neither would justice have been so 
long, so disgracefully, and so disastrously- 
delayed. Eoth the history of the Near East 
and the fact of the present war which has 
ensued in large degree as a consequence of 
this question, have revealed to us the depths 
to which men are capable of descending in the 
scramble for territory and power; and they 
suggest the necessity of our being upon our 
guard against the apologists for evil who, in 
one form or another, are certain to make 
themselves heard at the final settlement. 

With regard to the dangers inherent in the 
Turkish situation it may not be amiss to quote 
a statement made by Mr. Samuel S. McClure 
in his Obstacles to Peace; "However difficult 
the various questions involved in the peace 
settlement," he writes, — "and no one can ex- 
aggerate the almost insoluble questions — the 
real problem of the war is Asiatic Turkey. 
The settlement of this question may involve 
a continuous series of devastating wars at 
longer or shorter intervals for generations." 

This was written in 1916, when the world 
situation wore a different aspect from that of 
today. The Russian Revolution had not then 



140 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

occurred and America had not entered the 
war, and there was no reason to suppose that 
the partition of Turkey, along traditional 
lines, among the victorious European powers 
would not follow the cessation of hostilities. 
But even today in a world made new by these 
events, Mr. McClure's statement still stands 
in the opinion of all who are giving thought 
to the issues of that decisive battle of the 
World War which we are in the habit of 
naming the Peace Congress. The Turkish 
Empire still presents possibilities for rivalry 
and discord which are not common to the other 
countries the destinies of which are now a 
matter of world debate. Mr. McClure's words 
are more than a statement of generally recog- 
nized truth. They are a solemn warning. 
They suggest the imperative necessity for a 
determined pre-Peace Congress educational 
propaganda which shall eliminate the possi- 
bility of any such settlement as might lead to 
future disaster. 

We are all fully aware of the extent to 
which Turkey, both because of her criminal 
character .and her central geographical posi- 
tion, has already figured not only in this but 



IN THE WORLD COURT 141 

in numbers of other wars which have em- 
broiled Europe. Should she again be the 
occasion or the means of precipitating another 
general war, it would probably mean the 
destruction of Western civilization, for, as the 
great historian Ferrera has recently said, we 
could not survive another such catastrophe. 
To attempt to solve this outstanding problem 
upon the old lines of expediency and com- 
promise would be to point the sword at the 
very heart of Europe and America. 

The drama which I have attempted swiftly 
to trace in the foregoing sketch is destined 
therefore to have a tremendous epilogue, since 
upon the solution of this central problem may 
be said to depend the fate not only of our 
chief protagonists but of the entire world. 
Hence this people become once more the 
moral arbiters, as it were, of a universal des- 
tiny; the token by which shall be registered 
the triumph either of Democracy or Autoc- 
racy, our victory or our defeat. 

In the imperial and economic point of view 
of the baser elements of Europe as well as in 
that of the Turkish despotism, the region so 



142 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

recently contested for will still be an object 
of extreme covetousness. And hj evidence 
already at hand we may anticipate the battle 
which these factors will wage on their own 
behalf. Claims will be put forward both in 
the interests of the present ruling race and 
of the foreign imperialists and exploiters; 
and in case it seems better to serve these 
designs, Turkey may be cited as calling for 
quite another solution from that which should 
be applied to other disintegrating empires — 
Russia or Austria for example; and Turkey- 
in-Europe, as requiring settlement by a code 
different from that demanded by conditions 
in Turkey-in-Asia. We are concerned only 
with the solution based upon the grounds of 
absolute justice which alone, we hope, the 
peoples of the world will tolerate. And for 
guidance we can do no better than to turn 
to Gladstone, that prophet of the Near 
Eastern question whose noble and inspired 
warnings Europe ignored, to humanity's in- 
estimable cost. Mr. Gladstone is discussing 
this same issue as it presented itself following 
the Treaty of Berlin: 

"My meaning. Sir," he says, "was that, 



IN THE WORLD COURT 143 

for one, I utterly repelled the doctrine that 
the power of Turkey is to be dragged to the 
ground for the purpose of handing over the 
Dominion that Turkey now exercises to some 
other great State, be that State either Russia 
or Austria or even England. In my opinion 
such a view is utterly false, and even ruinous, 
and has been the source of the main difficulties 
in which the Government have been involved, 
and in which they have involved the country. 
I hold that those provinces of the Turkish 
Empire, which have been so cruelly and un- 
justly ruled, ought to be regarded as existing, 
not for the sake of any other Power whatever 
but for the sake of the populations by whom 
they are inhabited. The object of our desire 
ought to be the development of those popula- 
tions on their own soil, as its proper masters, 
and as the persons with a view to whose wel- 
fare its destination ought to be determined." 
This point of view is, of course, none other 
than the one to which both the Allies and 
America have solemnly committed themselves. 
It is simply another lamp, a glorious one 
from the Past, to show the way. If this 
majestic estate called the Turkish Empire is 



144 THE TRAGEDY 'op ARMENIA 

to be rescued permanently from the despoiler 
and the conquest seeker, it will be because a 
settlement has been found adapted to the just 
and legitimate interests of all the native 
populations, Armenian, Syrian, Greek, Arab, 
Jew, and even Turk. What form this general 
and complicated settlement may take is not 
here a matter under speculation. But the 
solution called for by the Armenian claims is 
fortunately not so indefinite or so involved as 
to prohibit prophecy. While it may be true 
that, as Mr. Arnold Toynbee has said, the 
frontiers of the future Armenian state "cannot 
be forecast, they must include the Six Vilayets 
— so often promised reforms by the Concert 
of Europe and so often abandoned to the 
revenges of the Ottoman Government — as 
well as the Cilician highlands and some outlet 
to the sea." To these provinces will naturally 
be added the Armenian territory acquired by 
Russia. 

The question as to whether there are still 
enough survivors to populate such a state can 
most fortunately, in spite of the repeated 
attempts at national annihilation, be answered 
in the affirmative. It will not be necessary 



IN THE WORLD COURT 145 

for us to lean wholly upon the noble 
suggestion offered by M. Paul Doumer, late 
President of the French Senate, who recently 
said that should lack of numbers be urged by 
the enemy as an obstacle to an independent 
Armenian state **the dead must be counted 
with the living." The paucity of numbers is 
not so dire as to endanger in any way 
the Armenian hope. When Greece finally 
achieved her liberation from the Turkish yoke 
her numbers had been reduced to about 
500,000, and Serbia and Bulgaria were equally 
decimated when they achieved theirs; and yet 
these states have stood and their populations 
have multipHed. Armenia, with the Russian 
provinces, with Persia, and with the Disper- 
sion to draw upon, together with the refugees 
in the Caucasus, Mesopotamia, Egypt and 
Palestine, and the Armenians of Constanti- 
nople and Smyrna, who have in general been 
spared, is numerically in a stronger position 
than were any of the Balkan states. To de- 
fraud the Armenians of their independence 
because of the losses they have sustained, or 
for any other reason, would be not only to 
commit a monstrous outrage, but actually to 



146 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

accomplish the very end designed by their 
arch enemies, — ^to drain the brimming cup of 
their long sacrifice in company with these 
criminals. This the world will never consent 
to do, and it is with a high hope of a just and 
complete deliverance that Armenia will pre- 
sent herself at the World Court. 

It will not be the first time that this Figure 
has presented itself before an International 
Congress. But whereas in the past she came 
as an unknown supplicator, as an alien 
champion of a long forgotten cause — still in 
her quaint Crusader's dress — to throw herself, 
alas, in vain, upon the chivalry of the Great 
Powers, her sisters in religion and race; one 
marvels to record, that tomorrow she will 
come, her unsurrendered cross still upon her 
breast, as defender-at-arms of the victorious 
cause of World Democracy, — its last defender 
at the farthest outpost of the field of war in 
that long embattled region : a mysterious figure 
still, like one risen from the dead: a nation 
without a state, without navy, and even with- 
out army in the ordinary sense, a nation whose 
banner is scarcely known to any but her own 



IN THE WORLD COURT 147 

children; and yet the nation which, in propor- 
tion to numbers and resources, has paid the 
highest impost of hfe and treasure in the whole 
gigantic conflict. But for all the heroism of 
her gallant, her exalted sons and daughters 
she will wear no sword. In her right hand 
there will be a higher symbol of her might — 
the palm of her long martyrdom. 

Will the nations assembled there understand 
the full significance of this sublime Figure as 
she makes her plea for justice? Will they 
defend her from the Powers of Chaos and 
Darkness which have sought to destroy her 
in their rapacious desire to possess themselves 
of her inheritance? Will they uphold the 
spiritual verities of which she is the symbol, 
and in the perfect triumph of which alone lies 
the peace and safety of the world? 

Armenia will seek no crown or sceptre, nor 
will there be in her eyes the fire of revenge 
or lust for conquest. As throughout her his- 
tory, so will she still aspire for freedom, for 
culture, for progress and for peace, — for all 
that man holds good. The nations of the 
world, assembled in that great Council, will 
surely at last understand the grandeur, the 



148 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

pity and the meaning of her sacrifice, and by 
setting the seal of their approval upon her 
aspirations for democracy and light, they will 
indeed pay grateful tribute to the memory of 
her martyrs and bear testimony to their faith 
in the ideals for which those martyrs died. 



NOTES 

Note 1 

The Aryan origin of the Armenian race is recognized 
by all authorities. We are indebted to Herodotus for 
the specific story of their former connection with Europe. 
He says that the Armenians are a branch of the 
Phrygians. The Phrygians, according to traditioB, 
before their migration to Asia lived in the neighborhood 
of Macedonia. Strabo makes a statement which sug- 
gests an even more picturesque origin when he says that 
Armen, a native of Armenion, a city of Thessaly, sailed 
in company with Jason toward the country afterward 
named for him. Rawlinson seems to be the only authoi^ 
ity who does not trace the Armenians to Europe, Hfe 
theory is that Armenia itself was the original home of 
the Aryan peoples. The foundation for their owsi 
tradition that they are descendants of Thorkomj or 
Togarmah, a grandson of Japhet, may, for want of 
historical evidence, remain forever merely a matter for 
interesting speculation. 

Note 2 

In one of the earlier chapters of "The Beginnings of 
New England," Mr. Fiske, speaking of "the first boltl 
and determined manifestation of the Protestant temper 
of revolt against spiritual despotism," says: 

"From Armenia in the ninth century the Manichee.iB 



150 THE TRAGEDY OP AEMENIA 

sect of Paulicians came into Thrace and for twenty 
generations played a considerable part in the history 
of the Eastern Empire. They were known in Bulgaria 
as Bogomiles. In the Greek tongue they were called 
Cathari, or 'Puritans.' . . . 

"Their ecclesiastical government was in the main 
Presbyterian^, and in politics they showed a decided 
leaning toward democracy. They wore long faces, 
looked askance at frivolous amusements, and were 
terribly in earnest. Of the more obscure pages of 
mediaeval liistory, none are fuller of interest than those 
in which we decipher the westward progress of these 
sturdy heretics, through the Balkan peninsula into Italy, 
and thence into Southern France, where, toward the 
end of the twelfth century, we find their ideas coming 
to full bloom in the great Albigensian heresy. . . . 
After forty years of slaughter, these Albigensian 
Cathari or Puritans seemed exterminated, but the spirit 
of revolt against the hierarchy continued to live on 
obscurely, ready on occasion to spring into fresh and 
vigorous life. . . . This Protestant reformation, from 
the thirteenth century to the nineteenth, is coincident 
with the transfer of the world's political center of 
gravity from the Tiber and Rhine to the Thames and the 
Mississippi." 

Referring to Armenian Protestantism, the late Dr. 
Robert Chambers of Western Turkey Mission, writing 
in the Missionary Herald makes the following inter- 
esting statement: "Some of the first to discover and 
attach themselves to the American missionaries in the 



NOTES 151 

early part of the last century in Armenia were descen- 
dants of the Armenian Paulicians." 

Note 3 
Research on Armenian art is still in its infancy. Even 
the manuscript literature has not yet been fully studied. 
Of the art of illuminating, which advanced to a high 
degree of skill and beauty in the Middle Ages, we know 
comparatively little, although it is beginning to be made 
the object of special study by certain modern scholars. 
The gold and silversmiths' art, said to have attained its 
height in the tenth century, has continued to find 
fascinating and original expression even to recent days. 
I have seen an exquisite silver handleless cup, made by 
an artisan of the city of Van, famous for its silver- 
smiths, which exhibited evidence of marked genius. It 
was covered with very chaste, minute, and delicately 
wrought geometric designs. In the center, supported by 
a pivot, was a fish, covered with carven scales and very 
flexible, which, when the cup was filled with liquid, 
seemed to swim. A very suggestive article upon the 
subject of Armenian decorative art may be found in 
the International Encyclopedia. 

Note 4 
With regard to the physique of the Armenians we have 
much enlightening testimony from persons who have 
traveled and lived among them. The veteran missionary. 
Dr. Joseph K. Greene, author of "Leavening the 
Levant," attributes their survival as a people to their 
physical, no less than to their moral vigor: 



1S2 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

"The first reason of their survival," he says, "is that 
the Armenians inhabited, not the hot and feverish plains 
of Mesopotamia but the broad and elevated plateau of 
northeastern Asia Minor. Even as far south as Van, 
their ancient capital, their country was 6,500 feet above 
sea level, with the snow-capped peak of Ararat only 
one hundred miles to the northeast. Like the inhab- 
itants of the Caucasus — the Circassians — they were a 
ruddy, vigorous, healthy race. Their land was fertile 
and produced fine cereals and fruits, with abounding 
flocks and herds. Theirs was a life of toil, a perpetual 
fight with nature, but they breathed pure air and were 
well fed. Hence the Armenians were a hardy and 
handsome race, and were capable of great endurance." 

Even when subjected to the trials of migration, they 
continue to preserve their aspect of physical well being. 
Some twelve or more years ago, I heard that veteran 
orator, the late Mary A. Livermore, open an address 
to an audience of Armenians assembled in Faneuil Hall, 
Boston, with the following striking but very seriously 
spoken words: "This is the handsomest audience I have 
ever stood before." I myself have never addressed an 
Armenian audience without receiving an impression of 
their morally illuminated vitality. And frequently after 
lectures to American audiences, school teachers have 
come up to me to express both their admiration and love 
for the beautiful Armenian children in their care, and 
their indignation that such splendid human material 
should be so recklessly wasted. 



NOTES 153 

Note 5 
I cannot let the occasion pass without paying my 
personal tribute to the really chivalrous men and women 
in Europe and America who have consecrated them- 
selves to the Armenian cause. The names of Gladstone, 
Bryce, Dillon, Lynch, Zangwill, MacColl, the Duke 
of Argyle, Hamlin, Christie, Greene, Chambers, Bar- 
ton, Usher, Yarrow, Knapp, Trowbridge, Shattuck, 
Wheeler, Townsend, Leroy-Beaulieu, Berard, Anatole 
France, Jaures, Clemenceau, Pressense, Quillard, de 
Contenson, de Roberty, Rolin-Jaquemyns, Favre, Black- 
well, Barrows, Howe, Clement, Garrison, Storey, Ames, 
Mead, Dole, and others whose names will suggest them- 
selves to those familiar with this history, are destined 
to be immortally linked with the names of the Arme- 
nian patriots and to glorify the walls of the future 
Armenian Pantheon. 

Note 6 
The fact that only two years later America rescued 
Cuba from the tyranny of Spain is proof in itself that 
had she not been, in a way, inhibited by her traditional 
policy of non-interference in European affairs, she 
would have flown to arms in defense of Armenia, re- 
gardless of the fact that she was under no "treaty" 
obligations whatever. Had she been true to the vision 
of her prophets, ..!ie would, even as it was, have taken 
that step, and by assuming the role of moral leadership 
which she now enjoys, have added to her own spiritual 
force the strength of popular England, France, Italy, 
and who knows what other countries. 



154 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

Note 7 
Is it anything more than a coincidence that the 
persecution of the Jews in Russia took on at this time 
the violent character of earlier days — that Kishinef and 
Kief followed Van^ Ourfa^ and Sassoun? 

Note 8 

Even now, the privilege of acquaintance with some of 
the works of these, and others of the poets, is available 
through Miss Blackwell's admirable translations which 
appear in a volume entitled "Armenian Poems," nov^ on 
sale at the office of the Armenian and Syrian Relief 
Committee at 3 Joy Street, Boston. The price of this 
book is $1.00 and the entire proceeds are devoted by 
Miss Blackwell to the Relief Fund. 

Note 9 

The genuineness of the Armenian desire to co-operate 
with the Turks in the new government is testified to by 
all foreigners who were in Turkey at the time of the 
Proclamation. One of these, Mr. Herbert Adams Gib- 
bons, author of "The New Map of Europe," etc., re- 
marks, concerning both the antecedents and consequences 
of the "revolution," that the Young Turk agitators had 
been encouraged and even sometimes supported by 
Armenians, who "took them in, fed them and clothed 
them and subsidized their propaganda." 

"I was present at the overthrow of the Hamidian 
regime," he writes. "I saw the Young Turk exiles re- 
turning triumphant to Constantinople and Smyrna and 



NOTES 155 

Beirut. I saw Mohammedan Mullahs and Ulema 
fraternize with Armenian priests. I saw them riding 
in carriages together. I saw them kiss Christians on 
the cheeks and call them brothers. Then, immediately, 
remorselessly, and without hesitation the Young Turks 
turned on those who had helped them and whom they 
had used to bring about the Revolution. Not many 
months of the new regime had passed before we who 
were on the ground in Turkey realized that there was 
absolutely no difference between Young Turks and Old 
Turks. By 'peace and liberty' the Young Turks meant 
peace and liberty for Moslems — and not even for all 
Moslems ! Albanian and Arab Moslems were given to 
understand as fully as Armenians and Greeks and 
Syrians and Jews that Turkey was Turkish." 

Note 10 
For this document and for the information contained 
in the paragraph which follows it, as well as for other 
material, I am indebted to Mr. Mikael Varandian's ex- 
cellent book, "L'Armenie et la Question Armenienne." 

Note 11 
I have taken the description of the cartoon in 
"Karagoz" verbatim from "Armenia and the War" by 
Mr. A. P. Hacobian of London. To his moving and able 
presentation, I also owe other material as well as much 
inspiration. 

Note 12 
Mr. A. P. Hacobian, in his book "Armenia and the 
War," quotes the following from the Retch, organ of the 



156 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

Constitutional Democrats in Russia, issue of July 28, 
1916 (O. S.): 

"The scheme of settling Russian emigrants in the 
occupied parts of Turkish Armenia, recently discussed 
in the Duma, is being energetically carried out. This 
matter has been the subject of a lively discussion 
between the Emigration and Military authorities. 
Investigations are in progress, not only in the districts 
near the frontier, but also further afield, the fertile 
Mush valley being the object of special attention. 
Agricultural Battalions have been in course of organiza- 
tion since last autumn and already number 5,000 men. 
More v?ill be found presently. Armenians and Georgians 
are excluded. The task of these young arms is to culti- 
vate the fields on which investigations have been carried 
out, under the supervision of agricultural experts, in 
order to facilitate the provisioning of the army. The 
question of emigrating the families of these men is also 
under consideration. 

"Side by side with this scheme there exists another 
scheme of settling Cossacks in Turkish Armenia, on 
similar lines to what has already been done in Northern 
Caucasus with good results. Those who have conceived 
these schemes have in view the creation of a sufficiently 
broad zone inhabited by Russians, separating the Rus- 
sian Armenians from the Turkish Armenians. 

"Armenian refugees are gradually returning to their 
country and resuming the work of cultivating their lands. 
They usually settle in the villages that have suffered 
least, their own villages having been totally ruined. 

"To avoid confusion, the Grand Duke Nicholas 



NOTES • 157 

issued a Ukase in March last^ warning these returned 
refugees to keep themselves in readiness to vacate these 
districts on the establishment of Russian Civil Adminis- 
tration. In the same Ukase the Commander-in-Chief 
of the Caucasian Army has decreed that the vacant lands 
in the plains of Alashkert, Diadin and Bayazid may be 
given in hire up to the time of the return of their rightful 
owners. General Yudenitch has issued orders, however, 
prohibiting the settlement in these places of any other 
immigrants except Russians and Cossacks. Only those 
natives are permitted to return who are able to prove 
ownership of land or property by legal documents. This 
arrangement makes it impossible for the natives (Arme- 
nians) to return to their homes because it is ridiculous 
to speak of title-deeds when dealing with land in Turkey ; 
and as for other documents which prove ownership, 
these always get lost during flight. 

"In the above three plains, also in parts of the plain 
of Bassain, the surviving native inhabitants are debarred 
from returning to their homes and resuming their peace- 
ful occupations." 

Note 13 
The complicity of the German government with that 
of the Turk in the crime against the Armenians is evi- 
dent even on the face of things, since the Turks would 
not have dared to work in opposition to the will of their 
masters. Nor could they have secured the active co- 
operation of the German officers in Turkey had there 
not been strict accord between them. Such a statement 
as this by Signor Gorrini, in the interview already 



158 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

referred to, is typical o£ many directly corroborative 
statements made by foreign and other eye-witnesses 
who were in Turkey during the perpetration of the 
crime: "... the Germans and the Committee (of 
Union of Progress) constitute the one genuine, solid 
organization at present existing in Turkey — a masterly 
and most rigorous organization, which does not hesitate 
to use any weapon whatever; an organization of 
audacity, of terror, and of mysterious, ferocious 
revenue." 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

For information concerning Armenian history^ the 
Armenian question^ the Near Eastern question^ travel 
in Armenia^, Armenia in the War^ Armenian history 
and art, the reader is referred to the following works, 
to v/hich the author wishes to acknowledge her indebted- 
ness. 
In English: 

The History of Vartan, and of the Battle of the 
Armenians: an Account of the Religious Wars 
between the Persians and Armenians, by Elisseus, 
Eishop of the Amadunians. Translated from the Arme- 
nian by C. F. Neumann. London, 1830. 

History of Armenia, hj Father Michael Chamich. 
Translated from the original Armenian by Johannes 
Avdall. Calcutta, 1827. 

Researches in Armenia, by E. Smith. Boston, 1833. 

Travels and Researches in Mesopotamia and 
Armenia, by W. F. Ainsworth. London, 1842. 

Travels in Armenia, by A. H. Layard. London, 
1853. 

The Armenian Church — History, Liturgy, Doc- 
trines AND Ceremonies, by E. F. Fortescue. London, 
J. T. Hayes, 1872. 

Armenia and the Armenians, by R. D. J. Issaver- 
dens. Venice, 1878. 



160 THE TEAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

Life and Adventures in Trebizond, Erzerum, 
Tabriz, by A. Vambery. London, 1886. 

Armenia and the Campaign of 1877, by C. B. Nor- 
man. London, 1878. 

The Armenians, or the People of Ararat, by M. 
C. Gabrielian. Allen, Lane & Scott, Philadelphia, 1892. 

Twenty Years of the Armenian Question, by 
James Bryce, in his Transcaucasia and Ararat, pp. 
446-525. 1890. 

Armenia and the Armenians, by E. J. Dillon (a 
section in his Russian Characteristics). 

The Rule of the Turk, by Frederick D. Greene. 
Putnam, New York, 1896. 

Turkey a'nd the Armenian Atrocities, by E. M. 
Bliss. 

England's Responsibility toavard Armenia, by 
Malcolm McCoU. Longmans, London, 1895. 

Through Armenia on Horseback, by George H. 
Hepworth. Button, New York, 1898. 

Armenia: Travels and Studies, by H. F. B. Lynch. 
Longmans Green, London, 1901. 

The Armenian Awakening: a History of the 
Armenian Church, by Leon Arpee. University of 
Chicago Press, 1909. 

On the Cross of Europe's Imperialism: Armenia 
Crucified, by Diana A. Apcar. Fukuin Printing Co., 
Yokohama, 1918. 

The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman 
Empire, 1915-16. Documents presented to Viscount 
Grey by Viscount Bryce, with a preface by Viscoufit 
Bryce. English Blue Book, London, 1916. 



BIBLIOGBAPHY 161 

Armenian Atrocities: The Murder of a Nation, 
by Arnold J. Toynbee. Hodder & Stoughton, London, 
1915. 

The Blackest Page of Modern History; Events 
IN Armenia in 1915, the Facts and the Responsibili- 
ties, by Herbert Adams Gibbons. Putnam, Ne%v York 
and London, 1916. 

The Story of the Armenian Dynasties, by James 
L. Barton. The Independent^ March 5tb, 1899. 

The Reconstruction of Poland and the Near 
East; Problems of Peace, by Herbert Adams Gibbons. 
Century, New York, 1917. 

Armenia and the War, by A. P. Hacobian, with a 
preface by Viscount Bryce. Hodder & Stoughton, Lon- 
don and New York, 1917. 

The Turkish Empire: its Growth and Decay, by 
Lord Eversley. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1917. 

Travel and Politics in Armenia, by Noel E. Bux- 
ton and Harold J. Buxton, with an introduction by 
Viscount Bryce and a contribution on Armenian History 
and Culture by Aram Raffi. Smith, Elder & Co., Lon- 
don, 1914. 

Armenia Past and Present: a Study and a Fore- 
cast, by W, L. Williams, with an introduction by T. P. 
O'Connor, M. P. P. S. King & Son, Ltd., London, 1916. 

The Pan-German Plot Unmasked, by Andre 
Cheradame, with an introduction by the Earl of Cromer. 
Scribners, London, 1917. 

Two War Years in Constantinople: Sketches of 
German and Young Turkish Ethics and Politics, by 



162 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

Harry Stuermer. Translated from the German by E. 
Allen and the author. Doran, New York, 1917. 

The War and the Bagdad Kailway: the Story of 
Asia Minor and its Relation to the Present Con- 
flict, by Morris Jastrow, Jr. Lippincott, 1917. 

The Near East from Within, anonymous. Button, 
New York, 1918. 

The Golden Maiden and Other Folk and Fairy 
Tales told in Armenia, by A. G. Seklemian, with an 
introduction by Alice Stone Blackwell. Helman Taylor 
Co., Cleveland, O., 1898. 

Armenian Poems, rendered into English verse by 
Alice Stone Blackwell. Armenian Relief Comm., 3 Joy 
St., Boston, 1917. 

Armenian Legends and Poems, compiled and illus- 
trated by Zabelle C. Boyajian. With an introduction by 
Viscount Bryce, and a contribution on Armenia, its 
Epics, Folk Songs and Mediaeval Poetry by Aram Raffi. 
Dent, London, 1916. 

Armenian Literature, with an introduction by Rob- 
ert Arnot. Revised Edition, London, 1901. 

Armenian Poems: Metrical Version, by Robert Arnot. 
London, 1901. 
In French: 

Histoire d'Armenie, by Moses de Khoren. Trans- 
lated from ancient Armenian by P. E. Le Vaillant de 
Florival. Venice, 1841. 

L'Armenie et la Question Armenienne, by Mikael 
Varandian. With a preface by Victor Berard. Kava- 
nagh et Cie, Laval, France, 1917. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 163 

CoNTEs Arm:i&niens, Traduits de l'Armenien Mod- 
erne, by Frederic Macler. Leroux, Paris, 1903. 

Mekhitaristes de Saint Lazare, Histoire d'Arme- 
nie, Litterature Armenienne, by Paul Emile Le 
VaiUant de Florival. Typographic Armeniennc de Saint 
Lazare, Venice. 

L'Armenie Chretienne et sa Litterature, by Felix 
Neve. C. Peters, Louvain, 1886. 

L'Armenie, son Histoire, sa Litterature, son Role 
EN l'Orient, with an Introduction by Anatole France, 
by Archag Tchobanian. Societe du Mercure de France, 
Paris, 1897. 

PoEMES Armeniens, Anciens ET MoDERNES, Precedes 
d'une Etude de Gabriel Mourey sur la Poesie et I'Art 
Armeniens, by Archag Tchobanian. Librairie A. 
Charles, 1902. 

Chants Populaires Armeniens, Preface de Paul 
Adam, by Archag Tchobanian. Societe d'Editions 
Litteraires et Artistiques, Paris, 1903. 

Petite Bibliotheque Armenienne, Publiee sous la 
Direction de Frederic Macler. Paris. 

L'Orient IniSdit — Legendes et Traditions Arme- 
niennes, by Minas Tcheraz. Leroux, Paris, 1912. 

Etudes sur la Miniature Armenienne, by Seraphin 
Abdullah and Frederic Macler, Paris, 1909. 

Au Milieu des Massacres — Journal de la Femme 
d'un Consul de France en Arm:6nie, by Emilie Carlier 
Juven, Paris, 1903. 

Also to the following journals: The New Armenia, 
949 Broadway, New York; The Armenian Herald, Old 



164 THE TRAGEDY OF ARMENIA 

South Building, Boston; La Voix de I'Armenie, 30 Rue 
Jacob, Paris. 

(A complete bibliography of the Armenian dis- 
asters, compiled by Prof. W. W. Rockwell, may be had 
from the American Committee for Armenian Relief, One 
Madison Avenue, New York City, price 10 cents.) 



